yours in dentistry: Bk

On Saturday, November 4th at 7pm, ISSUE celebrates the exact day of the organization’s 20th Anniversary with yours in dentistry, a specially produced final program from 2023 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow evil dentist (Alice Gerlach & David Farrow). This culminating Fellowship project brings together artists blurring the boundaries between life/work and art/work. These practitioners understand community building as integral to their creative practice, breathing new life into the spaces, scenes, and worlds they travel through. Multi-disciplinary artist Bk will present work that unifies sculpture, noise, and poetry to uncover unexamined histories. Electronic musician and performance artist ANNIHIL will intertwine pop, punk, and experimental dance music within a kaleidoscope of light and sound. Performances will occur at ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Pl. theater within an immersive sound and sculptural installation by evil dentist. This installation will draw from their research to demonstrate how experimenting with space transforms intimacy, allowing a closeness in sound that is the kernel of community.   

Caught between doing-it-yourself and institutionalization, how do artists navigate the cost of living in New York City? What freedoms and compromises exist between the basement venue and the fine art gallery? What role do artists play in shaping urban change? These questions have informed evil dentist's curation at ISSUE both in gathering artists who embody socially engaged creative practices and in transforming underutilized spaces through performance. The purpose of evil dentist's curatorial and installation practice is not to offer conclusive answers, but to arrange materials, perspectives, and people to initiate the conversation. 

​​Bk (Benjamin Kendall) is a poet, performance, visual, and sound artist from Atlanta, Georgia currently based in Brooklyn NY. Bk’s practice moves between objects and sound, reflecting on how sculpture reimages communication within physical and sonic spaces. Conceptually, Bk is concerned with revoicing and the reclaiming of stolen space, time, and histories. Audiences experience a unfolding and refolding of time through Bk’s performances as the stable space of experience is lost among the many ways time could have unfolded differently. To this end, Bk images every performance as “reconnecting, rediscovering, and recreating moments hidden; creating a new language of representation.”