ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the selection of writer and performer Justin Allen, vocalist, composer, and performance artist Holland Andrews, and composer and performer John McCowen, as Artists-In-Residence presenting new works in the 2020 season.
Founded by Suzanne Fiol, ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program has provided a support structure for New York-based musicians, 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.
Justin Allen experiments with performance and writing. His work focuses on the ways aesthetic, structural, and conceptual features in art and language communicate social histories. He has performed at Performance Space New York and Brooklyn Museum with frequent collaborator Devin Kenny, and performed solo work at Movement Research at the Judson Church, BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, and ISSUE Project Room, among other venues. He has read his poetry, fiction, and nonfiction at venues such as The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, Kampnagel (Hamburg, Germany), and Artists Space. His work has received support from Franklin Furnace, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The Shed. He is from Northern Virginia and lives and works in New York City.
Holland Andrews is an American vocalist, composer, improviser, and performance artist whose work is based on emotionality in its many forms. In their work, Andrews focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build soundscapes encompassing both catharsis and the interplay between dissonance and resonance to tell stories of the interior worlds of humanity. Frequently highlighting themes surrounding vulnerability and healing, Andrews arranges music with voice and clarinet, harnessing the innate qualities of these instruments’ power and elegance to serve as a vessel for these themes. As a vocalist, their influences stem from a dynamic range of musical stylings including contemporary opera, free jazz, musical theater, as well as ambient, drone, and noise music. In addition to creating solo work, Andrews develops and performs the soundscapes for dance, theater, and film, and whose work is still toured nationally and internationally. Andrews has gained recognition from publications such as The New York Times, Uncut Magazine, Electronic Sound, NPR, and more. Holland Andrews is currently based in New York City. Andrews also performs solo music under the stage name Like a Villain.
John McCowen is a Brooklyn-based composer and performer originally from Southern Illinois. His work focuses on extending the possibilities of the clarinet & contrabass clarinet. John embraces long-form drones, difference tones, and beating harmonics as a means to extrude the dimensions within - treating the clarinet as an acoustic synthesizer. His discography includes releases on Edition Wandelweiser, International Anthem, Astral Spirits, NNA Tapes, Cairn Desk, and others. Performances include Le Guess Who Festival (Utrecht), Norður og Niður Festival (Reykjavik), Hot Air Music Festival (SF), Bowling Green New Music Festival, Supersonic Festival (Birmingham), Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA), The Stone, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Constellation (Chicago). John was the 2017 & 2019 artist-in-residence at Lijiang Studio in Yunnan, China. He received the Elizabeth Mills Crothers Award for excellence in music composition in 2016 from Mills College where he also received an MA in Music Composition under the mentorship of Roscoe Mitchell.
