The Steve Circuit by Yuko Otomo & Matt Mottel: The Knitting Factory & Tonic with Jean Carla Rodea & Gerald Cleaver, White Out

This Summer, 2020, ISSUE and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council present The Steve Circuit, an episodic series of videos and digital artwork dedicated to the late beloved poet Steve Dalachinsky developed by his wife, painter and poet Yuko Otomo, and interdisciplinary artist Matt Mottel. Born in Brooklyn in 1946, Dalachinsky was an unforgettable fixture within particular strains of experimental music, poetry, and art—and at cultural happenings and gatherings of all kinds in Lower Manhattan and beyond. Dalachinsky was an important figure to many. He passed away September 16th, 2019.

Steve’s art was created in tandem with the public life he lived. The places he inhabited—arts venues, community gardens, the New York Public Library neighborhood branch, his Spring Street sidewalk store—were all part of his daily routine. He was influenced by the culture he witnessed. He created his art both in public and at home. Late at night, in his apartment, after returning from film screenings, art openings, and multiple concerts, he returned to his collage artwork and to type up the poems he had written by hand during the day out in the world.

Over the course of six events throughout the Summer, 2020, these historical sites will be revealed in a weekly online presentation. Each week, videos made by Otomo & Mottel will be streamed pairing Dalachinsky text, recordings, and artwork, with additional artistic collaborators who were part of the Dalachinsky orbit. The online cultural map and presentation will provide a “virtual polaroid snapshot” of Downtown New York’s cultural history.

In addition to Otomo and Mottel, the series will feature contributions from Vito Ricci & Lise Vachon, Andrew Lampert, Jean Carla Rodea & Gerald Cleaver, Tom Surgal & Lin Culbertson, William Parker & Matthew Shipp, Lee Ranaldo & Leah Singer, and Loren Connors & Suzanne Langille.

Yuko Otomo is a visual artist and a bilingual poet of Japanese origin. She also writes art criticism, essays, travelogues, translates and keeps her cultural journal. She showed her visual work at Tribes Gallery, Anthology Film Archives Courthouse Gallery, ABC No Rio, Brecht Forum, Gallery 128 and Vision Festival etc. She read at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, Bowery Poetry Club, The Stone, ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Cornelia St. Café, NYU, and NYPL in NYC and in France, Germany and Japan. Her publications include Garden: Selected Haiku (Beehive Press), Small Poems (Ugly Ducking Press), The Hand of the Poet (UDP), Cornell Box Poems (Sisyphus Press), PINK (Sisyphus Press), STUDY & Other Poems on Art (UDP), Elements (Feral Press), KOAN (New Feral Press), FROZEN HEATWAVE: a collaborative linked poem project with Steve Dalachinsky (Luna Bisonte Prods) and the most recent Anonymous Landscape (Lithic Press). She lives in New York City.

Matt Mottel enlivens primary source materials and creates collaborative artworks that amplify knowledge and provide access to subterranean culture. Social activism and cultural community are threads that run throughout Mottel’s extensive body of performances, videos, sculptures and music. Mottel’s comprehensive artistic foraging stems from his native New York upbringing. ‘Moonlight University’ was in session, with Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo, who he first encountered as a teenager on the downtown new york scene in the late 90’s. In 2010, Mottel was selected by the late ISSUE Project Room founder Suzanne Fiole as an Artist in Residence, and it was in this period that he developed an ongoing multimedia project that utilizes the cultural photography of his father, Syeus Mottel. He is currently researching the 18th century era of the keytar and is also inspired by the 24 hour format that was HnH Bagels…. ‘it's everything.’

Jean Carla Rodea (b in Mexico City) is a research-based interdisciplinary artist and educator currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work involves a variety of disciplines and mediums such as music, sound, poetry, vocal performance and performance art, photography, video, movement, and sculpture. Her artistic practice deals with spaces and instances where problematic socio-political and cultural constructs are rendered visible through multimedia installations and performance. As a musician, Jean Carla is dedicated to perform and compose a plethora of music/sound in a variety of settings – from solo to large ensembles. She has performed and recorded with William Parker, Darius Jones’ vocal quartet Elizabeth-Caroline Unit, Gerald Cleaver’s Uncle June, Anthony Braxton’s Syntactical Ghost Trance Music Choir, Cecilia Lopez’s Machinic Fantasies, and Talibam!. In addition to this, she leads her own multi-media projects; Buscando a Marina/Looking for Marina, and Azares. Jean Carla has worked with Amirtha Kidambi, Patricia Nicholson, Jo Wood Brown, Rachel Bersen, Anastasia Clarke, Taylor Ho-Bynum, Joe Morris, Stephen Haynes, Matt Mottel, etc. She has performed extensively and shown work at Roulette Intermedium, Carnegie Hall, BRIC, Knockdown Center, Judson Church, Danspace, Center for Performance Research, Panoply Lab, Parallel, Rio ll Gallery, The Clemente, BRAC, WAAM, El Museo de Los Sures, Casul, The Graduate Center, to mention a few.

Drummer Gerald Cleaver, born and raised in Detroit, is a product of the city’s rich music tradition. Inspired by his father, drummer John Cleaver, he began playing the drums at an early age, gaining early invaluable experience with Detroit jazz masters Ali Muhammad Jackson, Lamont Hamilton, Earl Van Riper, and Pancho Hagood. He moved to New York in 2002, and he has toured and/or recorded with Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, Lotte Anker, Matt Shipp, William Parker, Craig Taborn, Kevin Mahogany, Charles Gayle, Mario Pavone, Ralph Alessi, Jacky Terrasson, Muhal Richard Abrams, Tim Berne, Jemery Pelt, Ellery Eskelin, David Torn, Miroslav Vitous, Terje Rypdal, Michael Formanek and Tomasz Stanko, among others.

White out: a means of obliterating the written word. A crippling weather condition. A jarring form of cinematic transition. A band. Formed in 1995, arising from the lower depths of new york’s pre-gentrified chelsea section, white out thrust their original brand of experimental sound onto an unsuspecting public overloaded with grunge and its immediate aftermath, and secretly yearning for a new musical direction.White out (whose core membership consists of lin culbertson: analogue synths, autoharp, flute, mystery electronics and otherworldly vocals, and tom surgal: drums, devices, celestial bells etc.) continue on in their unwavering assault of the sound/silence continuum, generating a healthy mixture of fear, spatial disorientation, cosmic ennui, and occasional beauty in their sonic wake. Seven albums in, working with a variety of labels like northern spy, ecstatic peace, atp, audiomer and no fun, white out has accumulated an impressive array of enablers along the way, including thurston moore, nels cline, jim o’rourke, and william winant among others. In march 2011, white out capitalized on their multifarious connections with their fellow musical brethren by curating a month at john zorn’s performance space the stone, presenting 54 shows in total. White out’s latest release is entitled accidental sky, a collaboration with longtime friend and compatriot nels cline, on the northern spy label.