ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the selection of evil dentist (Alice Gerlach and David Farrow) as 2023 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow. Next year, the duo will present Corporate Retreat, a curated series of performances appropriating the banality of office space to reimagine the relationship between artistic practice and community building.
evil dentist notes, “The emergent real estate dynamics of post-pandemic New York City are ripe for experimentation — while rent prices in the outer boroughs soar, corporate flight from Manhattan relative to the growing popularity of remote work has left office-centric districts markedly vacant. Corporate Retreat gathers artists who double as community organizers to build a shared toolkit for creative transformation of urban space. As independent musicians encounter increasing financial hurdles to perform and develop their craft through rising rents and predatory venues, evil dentist’s Corporate Retreat highlights artists navigating these challenges. Taken together, evil dentist’s three programs explore how artists repurpose urban infrastructure to remove barriers to musical experimentation and innovation.”
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. Entering its seventh year, ISSUE’s Curatorial Fellowship commissions emerging New York curators to organize challenging projects, serving a central role in fulfilling ISSUE’s mission to support and cultivate innovative art within the local community. evil dentist follows Theodore (ted) Kerr, ISSUE’s current 2022 Fellow, Sami Hopkins in 2021, Leyya Tawill in 2020, Benedict Nguyen in 2019, Queer Trash in 2018, and DeForrest Brown Jr. in 2017.
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, who passed away in October, 2009, 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.
evil dentist was created by Alice Gerlach and David Farrow as a response to the decline in do-it-yourself venues accelerated by the pandemic. evil dentist seeks to reclaim space for unconventional, artist-run venues prioritizing community building over commerce. Emerging from a series of performances in a haphazardly built East Village loft, evil dentist centers on the notion that performance and place-making are intertwined, politicized acts of care. Curatorially operating at the fringes of experimental, pop, and rave music, evil dentist programs eclectic performances that challenge artists to rethink how they connect to their audience.
David Farrow is an American sound artist, researcher, and ethnomusicologist based in New York City. Farrow's artistic work employs noise, synthesis, and field recordings to explore how sound and listening practices construct political space. They are completing their PhD in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University examining the limits of do-it-yourself music scenes' cultural and economic autonomy within capitalist urban development. Farrow's writing has appeared in Current Musicology, Tiny Mix Tapes, and within zines published by evil dentist. They have delivered presentations on their research at Harvard University, Columbia University, Northwestern University, Georgetown University, and New York University. Farrow's audio/visual installation work has been exhibited at the University of London. They regularly perform experimental electronic music as “certain lives” within New York’s experimental, rave, and independent music scenes.
Alice Gerlach is an experimental cellist and composer based in New York City. She first became involved in DIY music organizing as a teenager in Chicago fascinated with the emerging punk, indie rock, and rap scenes and the unconventional venues that helped define them. Her current solo project, Alice Does Computer Music, explores cello-based sound design in an ambient pop format.
