ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the selection of musician Charmaine Lee, multimedia artist Ying Liu, interdisciplinary performer Rena Anakwe, and light and color improviser Lindsay Packer, as Artists-In-Residence presenting new works in the 2019 season.
Founded by Suzanne Fiol, ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program has provided a support structure for New York-based musical ensembles, composers, choreographers, and interdisciplinary artists since 2006. The residency program commissions emerging New York artists to create challenging time-based works, serving a central role in fulfilling ISSUE’s mission to support and cultivate artists within the local community.
Charmaine Lee is a New York based vocalist. Her music is predominantly improvised, favoring a uniquely personal approach concerned with spontaneity, playfulness, and risk-taking. Beyond extended vocal technique, Charmaine uses amplification and microphones to augment and distort the human voice. She has performed with leading improvisers Nate Wooley, id m theft able, and Joe Morris, and maintains ongoing collaborations with contemporaries Conrad Tao, Zach Rowden, Lester St. Louis, Leila Bordreuil, and Ben Bennett. She has performed at venues such as ISSUE Project Room, the Lincoln Center, Roulette, The Kitchen, and the Stone. Charmaine is a member of the Editorial Board of Sound American. As a composer, she has been commissioned by the Wet Ink Ensemble (2018) and has a forthcoming commission with Spektral Quartet (2018). Her music has been released on Anticausal Systems.
Lindsay Packer plays with the call and response of color and light, form and site in photography, time-based media, installations, and improvisational performance. With a spontaneous spirit and non-hierarchical approach to materials and process, she creates immersive environments that are integral to and inseparable from their architectural and sonic contexts. These analog RGB color spaces are luminous, temporary geometries that question divisions between analog and digital ways of seeing. Packer’s work connects the visual language of painting to the kineticism of early cinema while allowing site, movement, chance, and improvisation to inform color and composition. A Fulbright Fellow to India in Installation Art and two-time Artist-in-Residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Packer received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2018, she performed as part of Melanie Maar’s collaborative Line Death Dance project at the Chocolate Factory Theater (LIC), had solo exhibitions at Transmitter, Custom Program Project Space, and ChaShaMa Space to Present at One Brooklyn Bridge Park (all in Brooklyn), and will premiere an animated film at the MONO NO AWARE XI festival of cinema arts. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Rena Anakwe, is a Brooklyn-based Nigerian-Canadian-American interdisciplinary artist and performer, working primarily with sound, visuals, and scent. Exploring intersections between traditional healing practices, spirituality and performance, she creates works focused on sensory-based, experiential interactions using creative technology. She is a Fall 2018 Signal Culture Artist-in-Residence, a 2018 Abrons Arts Center (AAC) Sound Series commissioned artist and has shown solo and collaborative audio/visual/scent work at: BRIC Arts, St. Augustine’s/Abrons Arts Center, MoMA PS1, Nublu 151, Times Square, Pioneer Works, Montez Press Radio @Mathew Gallery & Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair, H0L0, Mount Tremper Arts, Le Poisson Rouge, La MaMa E.T.C., Danspace Project, MAD Museum of Arts and Design, TCC Chicago (CHI), MINKA [BAX/Submerge! Festival], The Tank, CTM Festival/HAU Hebbel am Ufer at HAU1 (GER) and was a guest curator for Knockdown Center’s ‘Sunday Service.’ She has released solo and collaborative releases on: NON Worldwide (as DJ Lady Lane) and UNO NYC. And has had her sound art transmitted on: Radiophrenia (SCT), Radio Space/Borealis Festival (NOR) and Resonance FM (UK.) Rena is a graduate of: the Interactive Telecommunications Program (iTP) at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (MPS), The Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University (MFA) and New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business (BS.)
Ying Liu is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist born and raised in a small island named Zhoushan in the East China Sea. Her evening-length, hybridized works often mix consumer technology such as VR, GoPro and GPS, and fuse mediums including theater, dance, video, and performance art with DIY props and an exuberant sense of play. The diverse, multi-generational casts of her projects range from professional ballet dancers, sociologists, house music DJs, psychotherapists, scientists and filmmakers – sometimes all in the same performance. Highlighting the shifting, participatory nature of viewership, mediated in real time by everyday use of technology, her practice reveals how experimentation is most fruitful when it escapes predetermination. Poking at the traditional boundaries between performer and spectator, she stirs together contradictory forces of memory, spatiality, and the inherent friction of sociality. New York’s Emily Harvey Foundation has presented her projects in numerous solo showings including performative screening (O Ppl Prefer) Techshting A(ny)way (2014), Don’t Be Shy, Man! – a hybrid show inspired by Stuart Sherman’s poetry (2014), and evening-length dance performance Now We Start from the Arm (2016). In summer 2017, she staged HANG OUT, a site-specific, three-episode play in Manhattan Chinatown’s Sara D. Roosevelt Park. MAKE A FOUNTAIN, a 302-page catalog accompanying and documenting those performances, was released in April 2018. In August 2018, she led a 6-hour theatrical workshop, an extension of HANG OUT presented by the Northwest Film Forum, in and about Capitol Hill, Seattle, a changing neighborhood where the Forum is located. Recently, she was part of the two-person show Cooked Two Ways, with artist C. Spencer Yeh at gallery Chen's in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She is currently a resident artist at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council 2018-19.
