Liam Mooney
Akbar Abbas
the wulf. & Coaxial x Compose LA
Friday, February 22, 8 pm
Curated by the wulf. board member Casey Anderson
Location: Coaxial Arts Foundation,
1915 South Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90016
Doors Open: 7:30pm
Artist: Liam Mooney
Speaker: Ackbar Abbas
Program: Liam Mooney’s Flatland
Liam Mooney’s Flatland (2019) is a work loosely patterned after Edwin Abbott’s novella, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Abbott’s examination of humanity—and the natural and constructed categories contained therein—still seems to have the sting of relevance, and the listener might not find it at all difficult to connect Abbott’s observations to features of present-day societies. Mooney’s work takes a sound-driven investigation of materiality as a jumping off point, often repurposing everyday objects to ends both cartoonishly-distorted and beautiful: drumheads are activated by a series of vacuum cleaners; Styrofoam coolers are bowed with large dowels, covered in rosin, until they disintegrate; etc. Mooney’s ability to arrange focused compositional forms around each re-presentation results in utterly unique sound experiences. An aficionado of fakes.
Ackbar Abbas is the author of some of the most influential texts on Hong Kong culture and literature, and on culture, literature, film, art, architecture, and critical theory more generally. A professor of comparative literature and film at the University of California, Irvine, Abbas was born, raised, and—as he puts it—corrupted in Hong Kong. He insists on thinking with whatever is at hand, materially and ideationally, on finding the deeply revealing in the obvious, significance amidst desolation, possibility in vulnerability, a map of culture in the design it authorizes.