ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the selection of Queer Trash as 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow. Queer Trash, a curatorial platform organized by Eames Armstrong, Michael Foster, and Richard Kamerman, is a framework for queer experimental performance practices across live disciplines. It is a roving series that rejects the terms, expectations, and exclusivity of avant-normativity. Queer Trash doesn’t strive to define queerness — it celebrates its indeterminacy.
In its second year, ISSUE’s curatorial Fellowship commissions emerging New York curators to organize challenging time-based projects, serving a central role in fulfilling ISSUE’s mission to support and cultivate innovative art within the local community. The Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship supports emerging curators in realizing ambitious new projects that will significantly transform their own artistic practice, move their work in new directions, and enable them to gain exposure to a broader audience. Queer Trash follows media theorist and writer DeForrest Brown Jr., ISSUE’s current 2017 Fellow.
Named for ISSUE’s visionary founder Suzanne Fiol, the program mentors a curatorial fellow by providing them with financial, technical and marketing support as they work to cultivate, incubate and present innovative music and performance projects.
The curatorial fellowship complements and builds upon ISSUE’s existing Artists-In-Residence Program (AIR). Both ISSUE’s AIR and Fellowship programs provide artists and curators with an opportunity to develop significant new works in partnership with ISSUE over the course of a year by offering a stipend as well as access to rehearsal space and facilities, equipment, documentation, pr/marketing, curatorial mentorship and technical expertise.
Suzanne Fiol was an extraordinary spirit, a force of nature and a prominent figure in the visual and performing arts worlds. As both a visionary artist and the founder of ISSUE Project Room, she created one of New York City’s premiere destinations for experimental culture and avant-garde performing arts— a legacy that will resonate for decades to come.
Queer Trash was founded by Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman in spring 2016. Active participants in experimental music scenes in New York City, Foster and Kamerman created Queer Trash in response to a lack of a dedicated queer platform within their communities. Queer Trash has hosted eight events at seven different locations throughout New York City, presenting both local and touring artists from as far as Mexico and Sweden working across experimental aesthetics and practices. A participant in the fifth Queer Trash, Eames Armstrong joined Queer Trash in July 2017 as the third curator of the series after six years of organizing visual and performance art in Washington, D.C..
Michael Foster graduated from Bard College in 2011. His work focuses on electro-acoustic improvisation, prepared saxophone, noise, free jazz, and their intersection with queer aesthetics. Current projects include The Ghost, While We Still Have Bodies, Weasel Walter Large Ensemble, Barker Trio, duos with Richard Kamerman (as The New York Review of Cocksucking), Ben Bennett, Leila Bordreuil, Lydia Lunch, and Ted Byrnes.
Richard Kamerman, a lifelong resident of New York City, has been breaking electronics and crashing computers while trying to coax interesting and unpredictable sounds out of them for over a decade. Occasionally, he has also presented himself as a more serious composer of re-performable written music. Keywords: amplification, magnification, obfuscation, systems design, game theory, patterns, human error, accident, failure. Although a firm believer in the axiom that "one man's trash is another man's treasure," he ceased collecting his instruments from piles of junk left on the curb several years ago, fearing he might bring home bedbugs. Recordings of his solo or collaborative works have been released by Erstwhile Records, Pilgrim Talk, Contour Editions, RRRecords, and Engraved Glass, among others. Kamerman has performed and/or his work has been otherwise presented throughout the US as well as internationally in Canada, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Chile. He additionally runs the small-press music label Copy For Your Records.
Eames Armstrong (they/she) is an artist and curator who works across painting, writing, and performance. Currently based in Brooklyn, Eames received an MFA from George Washington University in 2016. They have performed at the High Zero Festival, Sonic Circuits Festival, the Houston International Performance Art Biennale, the Fringe platform of the Venice International Performance Art Week; at Defibrillator, Chicago; Mobius, Cambridge, MA; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn; and many other spots. Eames was the 2016 Emerging Curator at VisArts in Rockville, MD, and a recipient of the Halcyon Arts Lab Fellowship in Washington, D.C.. Eames has spoken at the Corcoran College of Art and at the Luce Foundation at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Eames is currently invested in a research tangle of body art, industrial music, martyrs and saints, and transgender studies.
