ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the selection of composer, poet, and performer JJJJJerome Ellis, sound/visual artist, improviser, and performer Austin Sley Julian, and violist Joanna Mattrey, as Artists-In-Residence presenting new works in the 2021 season.
Founded by Suzanne Fiol, since 2006, ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence series has served a central role in fulfilling ISSUE’s mission to support artists in the local community. The program encourages selected NYC-based artists to take unprecedented creative risks in reaching the next stage in their artistic development, providing residents with a stipend plus production, marketing and curatorial support to create and present up to 3 new works over the course of a year.
JJJJJerome Ellis is a composer, poet, and performer. His current practice explores blackness, music, and disabled speech as forces of refusal and healing. JJJJJerome’s work has been heard at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Poetry Project, Sotheby’s, Soho Rep, and on This American Life. He’s a 2019 MacDowell Colony Fellow, a writer in residence at Lincoln Center Theater, and a 2015 Fulbright Fellow. JJJJJerome collaborates with James Harrison Monaco as James & Jerome (or Jerome & James). Their recent work explores themes of border crossing and translation through music-driven narratives. They have received commissions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ars Nova.
Austin Sley Julian is a visual and sound artist, improviser, and performer born in Brooklyn, NY. Julian has worked in many visual and aural media, making countless pieces through the years, touring nationally with several music projects that he has founded, namely Sediment club, Sunk Heaven, and Signal Break. Using prepared guitar, handmade instruments, discarded artifacts and debris, Austin Sley Julian creates moving, physically jagged, harsh gestures that hurl at their audiences. Through these kinetic sounds and sculptures Julian strives to convey a physically unstable energy in his work that reflects the technological society in which it was created. In Julian’s work, structures are constructing and deconstructing in the same gesture. Sounds float and sink in the same note. Image is viscerally close and encompassing, all in the same moment. Julian’s work shows an attraction to the aesthetic that is created by this dichotomy between rhythm, structure, and total collapse. His work strives to keep the audience in a constant conflict between these polar extremes. Austin Sley Julian as an artist is aiming to evoke feelings of anguish, frustration, and inherent conflict to confront the ugly instability of this condition with realism and “pessimistic optimism.”
Joanna Mattrey is a Brooklyn-based violist working in free improvisation, new music, and classical music. She uses extended techniques, modern compositional approaches, and electronic alterations to challenge the conventions of the viola. Drawing on her certifications in Alexander Technique, and Yoga, and an interest in Martial Arts, Joanna creates an embodied performance practice centered on ceremony and ritual. Her debut solo album, ‘Veiled,’ (Relative Pitch Records, 2020) explores the extreme sonic possibilities for viola and upcoming releases for Notice Recordings, Tripticks Tapes, Dear Life Recs, and Relative Pitch Records will include world premieres from her solo commissioning project, collaborative projects, and solo improvisations. Festival performances include Newport Jazz Festival, NYC Winter Jazz Fest, Lima Jazz Festival*, SxSW, and New Ear Festival. Residencies include Banff’s Composition Lab, MoMa PS1’s ALLGOLD, The Floor. Joanna has a B.A. in viola performance from the New England Conservatory (2009).
