Benefit for ISSUE Project Room

About

Wednesday, December 9th at 7pm, please join us for a special evening to benefit ISSUE Project Room at our historic 22 Boerum Place theater. Following the completion of our renovation's initial phase, this event offers a unique opportunity to glimpse ISSUE's home before the final stage of construction begins. 

The benefit celebrates the work of Susan Howe and David Grubbs, with a live presentation of their first collaboration, Thorow(2004), as a coda to their forthcoming performance retrospective and recent LP release, Thiefth, on ISSUE's Distributed Objects imprint. Also featured are esteemed performance artist and video pioneer Joan Jonas, as well as composer and vocalist GABI, who presents Michael Pisaro's Tombstones with a live ensemble of acoustic instruments and percussion.

A limited number of single tickets priced at $175 are now available. Tickets at the reduced rate of $125 are now sold out.

A small number of tables are available for purchase, please contact matthew@issueprojectroom.org for more information.

Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and three of literary criticism, Susan Howe held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University New York at Buffalo until her retirement in 2007. Her recent collection of poems, That This(New Directions), received the 2011 Bollingen Prize. David Grubbs has released twelve solo albums and is the author of Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, The Sixties, and Sound Recording (Duke University Press). Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and he has performed with the Red Krayola, Will Oldham, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, and Loren Connors, among many others. Susan Howe and David Grubbs's long out-of-print 2004 first album, Thiefth, was recently released for the first time on LP by ISSUE Project Room’s Distributed Objects label, accompanied by a special edition letterpress print.

Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video and performance art, and an acclaimed multimedia artist whose work encompasses video, performance, installation, sound, text, and drawing. Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s, and her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures.

Gabrielle Herbst’s formal training began at an early age, studying Balinese dance and gamelan in Indonesia while learning both the clarinet and piano. Her work has been showcased at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, as well as Roulette, who commissioned and premiered her first opera, Bodiless. Herbst’s experience writing for chamber orchestra and mixed instrumentation inspired her to develop a repertoire of short-form, vocal-centric compositions under the name GABI. The songs composed for her debut album,Sympathy (Software Recording Co), embrace the vast potential of the human voice as instrument, story, and landscape.

Composer Michael Pisaro's foray into experimental-pop, Tombstones, reconstitutes traces and fragments of the voice— finding it slipping down inexorable mountain-slopes of tones or bearing mute witness to dark octaves that loom over the delicate vocals. In taking small fragments of popular songs as the base for each piece, Pisaro reexamines the political landscape hidden within pop music.