Queer Trash: the Symposium with David Grollman, M. Lamar, and Qiujiang Levi Lu

Saturday, June 15th at 8pm, 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow (SFCF) and collective Queer Trash present the next evolution of their Symposium series featuring experimental artists David Grollman, M. Lamar, and Qiujiang Levi Lu. Exploring improvised sound interpolated with dialogue at ISSUE’s home theater, the artists will variously debate, elevate and discard questions of queerness, aesthetics, and community/communities within the arts, within a performance format developed over the preceding week by the participating artists and Queer Trash founders Michael Foster & Richard Kamerman. Throughout their residency in 2018, Queer Trash showcased the myriad ways that queers make sound, make sound queer, or skim around terms that may attempt to contain queer life. In September 2018, they created their first Symposium featuring Justin Allen, Derek Baron, Lorene Bouboushian, Ivoire Foreman, Sarah Hennies, Crystal Penalosa, and Claire Rousay. On June 15th, they present another slice of the endlessly sweeping range of current queer performance practices.

This Summer, the unique environment of ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Pl. theater provides an ideal laboratory for experimentation, where the audience can experience projects in-process. In service of our community, ISSUE invites artists to engage with a space in transition, and to question infrastructural and curatorial boundaries.

David Grollman is a percussionist from NYC who performs freely improvised music. He performs in art galleries, tiki bars, and venues of curious ambience made more curious by his mongrel sounds. David bows, scrapes, slaps, rubs, caresses abuses and generally tests the limits of his instrument. Anything is game. Anything may be a participant if the musical conversation calls for it. Artist, instrument, audience, and environment become ambiguous terms, conspiring in a theatrical exploration of chance dynamics and serendipitous exchanges. 

M. Lamar is a composer who works across opera, metal, performance, video, sculpture and installation to craft sprawling narratives of radical becomings. Lamar holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and attended the Yale School of Art, sculpture program, before dropping out to pursue music. Lamar’s work has been presented internationally, most recently at the Rewire Festival in the Hague, Trauma Bar Berlin, Atrium na Žižkově Prague, The Manhattan School of Music, Wellcome Collection London, The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Funkhaus Berlin Germany, Kunstgebäude Stuttgart, The Meet Factory in Prague, among others.

Qiujiang Levi Lu/卢秋江 (they/them) is a Beijing-born, NYC-based performance artist, improviser, composer, and educator. For their solo performance art practice, Lu designs Max/MSP-based electroacoustic feedback systems with cyborg-like body augmentations inspired by Objectophilia/animism, which include special microphones and speakers placed within bodily orifices and a custom-mapped flight joystick controller. Their resulting performances consist of choreographed, ritualistic improvisations that build on ancient Chinese drumming traditions and explore body dysmorphia, sexuality, spirituality, and mortality, linking together sound, movement, and violence in divine ceremony. Previous commissions have included Popebama, Luke Helker, and Ensemble Decipher. Lu’s works have been performed and featured at festivals, conferences, and venues such as High Zero Festival, MATA Festival, IRCAM forum, DiMenna Center, Jazz Showcase, E-Flux, SEAMUS conference, Elastic Arts, Spencer Museum of Art, NIME conference, NYCEMF, Oberlin MMG, Rhizome DC, and NowNet Arts conference.

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 was ISSUE’s 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow, and has hosted many events at 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.. Currently, Eames Armstrong has stepped back to focus on other projects. 

Michael Foster is a saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, and curator based in New York. His work hopes to unpack the queer feelings in improvised musics. As a curator he co-founded Queer Trash with Richard Kamerman, as well as Outlier and series throughout New York. His current ensembles include The Ghost, The New York Review of Cocksucking, Michael Foster with Strings, and often collaborates with Ben Bennett, Lydia Lunch, Leila Bordreuil, Brandon Lopez, John Blum, Sarah Hennies, and many others. 

Richard Kamerman has been breaking electronics and crashing computers while trying to coax interesting and unpredictable sounds out of them since the early 2000s. 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. He additionally ran the small-press music label Copy For Your Records, and he joined the ISSUE Project Room Board in Fall 2022.