REZA MONAHAN
Grimm's Aged Pill
August 1 - August 23, 2015
opening: Saturday, August 1, 7-10 PM
Stemming from a recent photo and video pilgrimage to Manhattan and Brooklyn, Grimm's Aged Pill is a multimedia installation wagering that elements of a peculiar cinematic narrative, pulled apart in different media, can energize a space with psychic planes outside the X-Y axes of classical cinema. This installation illustrates a space defined by water-jet-cut and laser-etched marble, text, and light sculptures. These works bask in a large-scale, film-loop glow of still photographs emerging from frenetic moving images, all while the disparate visual elements steep in an encompassing cauldron of machinic and electric audio.
Brushing against the tradition of “expanded cinema,” Grimm’s Aged Pill addresses the post–mass audience age but does so not to subvert fiction and drama but to further embrace them as a psychic textile to web narrative into the multidimensional grid of an experiential volume.
Reza Monahan is a Los Angeles based multimedia artist. His work varies in realization and can emerge as an intimate, small-gauge, three-channel installation tucked into the corner, a wailing audio flood overwhelming a massive, old wind tunnel, or a black-and-white film about the citizens of L.A. becoming a mournful, disembodied community of consciousness. Since studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and Art Center College of Design, Monahan’s work has underscored the curvilinear, oblique, volumetric, active, and temporal qualities of mediums in high-contrast heat for one another. He does so to achieve “meta-kinesthetics,” placing himself within traditions of the Haptic, a philosophical state of being 20th-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty equates to “felt phenomenology.” His work has exhibited internationally, having screened or been installed at the Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY; Echo Park Film Center and LACE, Los Angeles, CA; The LAB, San Francisco, CA; Kunsthaus Dresden, Germany; and OR Gallery, Vancouver, BC.