Laura Ortman

Friday, April 26th, ISSUE presents guitarist, bagpiper, and organizer David Watson in collaboration with percussionist, improviser, and producer Tony Buck, best known as a member of The Necks and for his far-reaching improvisational collaborations. Watson and Buck met in London in 1992 and have since developed a unique collaborative rapport, performing in Europe, America, and Australasia as well as forming two thirds of the trio Glacial (with Lee Ranaldo). Their new album Ask the Axes, to be released in May, subverts expectations for both bagpipes and drums, combining Watson’s experimental concerns with the properties of sound and space with Buck’s careful, intensive approach to percussion.

Multidisciplinary artist and 2010 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Laura Ortman also presents new solo work “from the rosined-out beast of her tough-stained violin -- where deranged crumpled wings twirling in starlight and oil slickness and shininess emerge.” Bearing heavy use of amplification and effects, Laura Ortman incorporates over-rosining to add smoke, dust, wind and slow-motion grittiness in her simultaneously scored and improvised compositions for amplified violin, Apache violin, whistles, tree branches, slides, guitar picks, bells and tuning fork.

The artists return to ISSUE after most recently participating in large-scale works in 2017, including Watson’s contributions to The Necks’ six hour durational piece Timeline (presented during their 30th anniversary), and Ortman staging Lary 7’s rendition of the late Tony Conrad’s Three Loops for Performers and Tape Recorders.

A soloist and a vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman works across recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks, and has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Caroline Monnet, Michelle Latimer, and Martha Colburn. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and pedal steel guitar, often sings through a megaphone, and is a producer of capacious field recordings. She has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, and Europe. In 2008 Ortman founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American cast. Ortman is the recipient of the 2017 Jerome Foundation Fellowship, the 2016 Art Matters Grant, the 2016 Native Arts and Cultural Foundation Fellowship, the 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Resident and the 2014/15 Rauschenberg Residency. She is also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.