ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the selection of interdisciplinary artists BINT, Jean Carla Rodea, and Keke Hunt as Artists-In-Residence presenting new works in the 2023 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 three new works over the course of a year.
BINT is a musician and interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. She is interested in the antiseptic role of the dissenting artist and mystic. Working across visual, performance and sound art, BINT applies modern methods to the traditional cultural technologies of her ancestries. In a uniquely interdisciplinary practice–often employing ritual and trance states–her body is the central medium used to provoke personal and collective boundaries around shame, identity, diaspora and the desecrated feminine. Sonically, she turns to a palette of dissonance, distortion, long-form drones and noise to access corresponding emotional states in herself and listeners–primarily using processed harmonium, vocals, cassette tapes and synthesizers. In 2019, BINT released Katabasis: Act I, an EP applying dark ambient power electronics and Arabic mother tongue to her classical Indian vocal training. She has shown work internationally including performance art commissions for Black Sabbath, the Copro Gallery and visual work at Coachella Music and Arts Festival. BINT is founder of The Barzakh, a podcast and educational platform focused on the revival and reclamation of Islam’s rich heritage of the occult and metaphysics.
Jean Carla Rodea is a research-based interdisciplinary artist and educator born in Mexico City. Her/their work involves a variety of disciplines and mediums such as music, sound, poetry, vocal performance and performance art, photography, video, movement, and sculpture. Their/her artistic practice deals with spaces and instances where problematic socio-political and cultural constructs are rendered visible through multimedia installation and performance. As a musician and improviser, Jean Carla is dedicated to performing and composing a variety of music/sound in diverse settings–from solo to large ensembles. She/they have performed and recorded with William Parker, Darius Jones’ vocal quartet Elizabeth-Caroline Unit, Gerald Cleaver’s Uncle June, Anthony Braxton’s Syntactical Ghost Trance Music Choir, and Cecilia Lopez’s Machinic Fantasies. In addition, she/they lead her/their multimedia projects; Buscando a Marina/Looking for Marina, and Nine Easy Steps Toward Oblivion. Jean Carla has worked and collaborated with Jo Wood Brown, Asiya Wadud, Art Jones, Leili Huzaibah, Miriam Parker, rebeca medina, Merche Blasco, Amirtha Kidambi, Patricia Nicholson, Rachel Bersen, Taylor Ho-Bynum, Joe Morris, Matt Mottel, etc. She has performed extensively and shown work at Roulette Intermedium, Carnegie Hall, BRIC, Knockdown Center, Judson Church, Danspace, Center for Performance Research, Panoply Lab, The Clemente, FiveMyles, mh PROJECT nyc, to mention a few.
Keke Hunt is the interdisciplinary sound and visual artist behind the “Just The Right Height” moniker, based in Queens, New York. Just The Right Height is the sonic extension of Hunt’s decade plus of work investigating pop tropes and their thematic narratives. In that time, Just The Right Height has released numerous records and cassette editions, while touring as a mainstay of the contemporary D.I.Y music scene and participating in wide swaths of underground culture around fashion, tattooing, and contemporary art. Just The Right Height utilizes blistering samples, algorithmically generated poetics, and subversion of pop culture tropes as a topical indictment on normative structures imposed on society at large. Coarse audio samples are triggered in real time without the use of a sequencer in correlation with a deadpan vocal reproach. With the female perspective as its narrative focal point, Just The Right Height forces a reconsideration of expectations, addressing the psychological and physiological scrutiny historically imposed on the female body in performance. Lyrics are deconstructed inverted, initially sourced from overt and myopic Pop culture references. Together these sonic and narrative approaches work to create a commentary on Pop, its projected social implications and personal implication. She turns this commentary in on itself time and again by playing with expectations of form, gendered content, and method of output and display. Notable touring ventures include outings with Via App, Sapphogheist, and Odwalla 1221. Just The Right Height is currently working on her third full length album, set to be released on HAORD Records. “Permanent Jewelry,” Hunt’s second publication, documenting her innovative and idiosyncratic tattoo work is set to be released in tandem with an exhibition of five years of works on paper in spring of 2022.
