ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the selection of interdisciplinary artists Axine M, Joni, Katie Porter and Kwami Winfield as Artists-In-Residence presenting new works in the 2024 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.
Axine M is the moniker of Maxine de las Pozas, a music artist residing in Brooklyn, NY. The Ancient Greek Axenos, or "inhospitable place," is a name for the Black Sea before nautical technology was advanced enough to safely traverse the water. Axine M is a vessel for musical inquiries and creative impulses across multiple genres and sentiments, carving out a space for itself against the grain of the dystopian imaginary. A recent self-released tape, USUSUSESESERERER (pronounced "user"), is a songwriterly exploration of interpersonal relationships under late-capitalism. Axine has published tapes with Summer Isle and Embalming Lately, a label she co-founded. As a DJ, Axine has mixed for c-, BIZAARBAZAAR, DUST, Hong Kong Community Radio, and The Lot Radio, among others. Maxine holds a master's degree in Music Technology from NYU Steinhardt, where she focused on the design of novel music controllers for live performance. Versions of her thesis were published in the proceedings of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2020) and International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2021). Maxine is a collective member and sound engineer for Chaos Computer. She works as an Audiovisual Technician.
Joni is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Joni’s works weave sound, image and word with performances that are concerned with the physicality of desire and control, the monumental, and the multitude of histories within the body. Through body movement and misplacement of sound, Joni’s practice seeks to decode inheritance systems and the uncontrollable reflexes within them. Traveling between Darbuka drums and glitch, magic and endurance, Joni presents work that scratches wounds in hopes for water rather than blood. Joni has a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (NY), and works within art and nightlife spaces. Joni is the Founder of Intima, a trans led Brooklyn based collective focusing on fusing art and performance into nightlife spaces and raves. Created to carve a space for the trans queer community that brings, Intima brought together thousands of queer trans people over the past year, with Joni organizing and curating all parties and events. Joni is currently on MoMa PS1’s Warm Up 2023 host committee and a contributor to the festival's curation. Joni has presented solo works as a performer and electronic musician at spaces such as Nowadays, Elsewhere, H0l0, Market Hotel, The Palace, Otion Front Studio, Chaos Computer, HERE Arts, 3 Dollar bill, Times Square Arts. She completed a residency at Otion Front Studio in March 2023. Joni is currently the nightlife manager of Brooklyn venue Market Hotel.
Katie Porter is a Brooklyn-based clarinetist, performer/composer, writer, and artist whose work draws from decades of experimental performance practices to create structures for music perception in space and time (over lifetimes or subtle daily increments/abstractions). She is currently a 2024 Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room. Devoted to collaboration, Katie's current projects include: Phase to Phase a bass clarinet duo with Lucio Capece in Berlin, Malosma a bass clarinet and bass flute duo with Christine Tavolacci in LA, Eternities with noise artist Bob Bellerue in NYC, Red Desert Ensemble, MOONS with Judith Berkson, Laura Cetilia, and Christine Tavolacci, Quartet or Two Duos with James Ilgenfritz, Lucie Vítková, and Teerapat Parnmonkol in NYC, and MUD with poet/filmmaker Anne Penders in Brussels. Passionate about fostering musical communities, she co-founded Listen/Space in Brooklyn, the Listen/Space Commissions in the mountains of Utah, and the biennial VU Symposium for experimental, electronic and improvised music. She has premiered works by Sarah Hennies, Teodora Stepančić, Andre Cormier, Raven Chacon, Daniel Goode, John Luther Adams, Yvette Janine Jackson, Manuela Meier, Michael Pisaro, Jurg Frey, Laura Cetilia, Brian Harnetty, Phill Niblock, Carolyn Chen, Patricia Alessandrini, Nomi Epstein, Quentin Tolimieri, Teodora Stepančić, and Christian Wolff, among many others. She can be heard on the labels Another Timbre (UK), Gravity Wave / Erstwhile (US), Edition Wandelweiser (DE), FTARRI (Japan), Infrequent Seams (US), Karl Records (DE), Editions Verde (US), Harmonic Ooze (US), and her writings are published in the journal Sound American. Katie is working to record a giant multi-year project for solo clarinet in Nancy Holt's land artwork, Sun Tunnels, in the remote Utah desert.
Kwami Winfield, also known as Soless Dialtone, is a multi-disciplinary sound artist, composer, and improviser born in Jersey City and based in Brooklyn. Winfield works with trumpet, electronics, percussion, trash, rocks, and other objects and collaborators, and is led by a fascination with the sticky, noisy, and often grotesque circuitry of everyday accumulation, consumption, and waste. Her collaborators include C. Spencer Yeh, with whom she released the double-cassette release At Home 2.23.2022, and she is a member of noise performance group Many Many Girls, who have brought their reel-to-reel and contact mic explorations to a range of arts spaces including Voluminous Arts’ CARA series and the vast parking lots of the Restaurant Depot on Newtown Creek. Winfield has developed her interdisciplinary collaborations as a Pioneer Works Music Resident (2023), an Artist in Residence at Chaos Computer (2023), and in ongoing compositional contributions to the works of choreographers Arien Wilkerson and Kyle Marshall. Alongside Cal Fish, Winfield co-runs and has released music on Call Waitn, a DIY label and toll free hotline featuring underground sounds at 917-426-4260.
Winfield’s residency is supported by Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center’s Technology Immersion Program (TIP) for Artists. This professional development program is for artists who have a passion for learning the tools of digital media but do not have the research, training and equipment necessary to produce artworks in this medium. The 2024 residency is part of an ongoing program collaboration between ISSUE and Harvestworks, two organizations that are committed to supporting the creation and presentation of experimental performance practices while sharing resources.
