Blackmailing the Universe

An Exhibition by Reza Monahan
November 16 – December 21, 2024 | Lazy Eye Gallery, YVML

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 16, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Pre-Reception Event: Jan Tumlir Lecture at 3:00 PM | Insideoutmosphere Performance at 3:30 PM

Lazy Eye Gallery at YVML is pleased to present "Blackmailing the Universe," a new multimedia exhibition by artist and filmmaker Reza Monahan, running from November 16 through December 21, 2024. The opening reception will take place on Saturday, November 16 from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM, preceded by a special lecture and performance starting at 3:00 PM.

At the heart of "Blackmailing the Universe" is a twenty-minute sound piece that serves as the exhibition’s catalyst. This audio play features a group of cantankerous spirits marooned aboard a defunct spaceship, drifting through the void of space. These spirits engage in an intricate and often chaotic conversation, challenging fixed notions of language by emphasizing the instability of the human condition and knowledge.

The characters in this piece are voiced by Alan Bishop, an experimental musician and performance artist. Bishop’s ability to embody a range of distinct personas gives the spirits a richly textured, otherworldly quality, further amplifying the sense of disorientation and uncertainty that permeates the dissociative narrative. Bishop’s vocal performance drives the spirits’ conversation to explore existential themes, where language becomes an ever-shifting, subjective experience rather than a concrete or universal concept.

Much like the exhibition’s evocative title, the spirits' conversation becomes an operative for holding the vastness of existence or fate to ransom. Through their disjointed dialogue, they seem to be forcing the universe to respond, as though demanding it reveal its secrets or surrender its hidden vulnerabilities. This act of defiance mirrors the broader human impulse to impose meaning and order on the incomprehensible forces that govern our reality, grasping for control in a universe that often feels indifferent and void of free will.

Alan Bishop is a celebrated American musician known for his work as the bassist and vocalist of the avant-rock-ensemble Sun City Girls. With a career that spans decades, Bishop has also released solo material under the aliases Alvarius B. and Uncle Jim. In the early 1980s, he played in the band Paris 1942 with Maureen Tucker of The Velvet Underground and was briefly a member of the skate punk group JFA. Bishop is currently a member of the Cairo-based band The Invisible Hands. He is also the co-founder of Sublime Frequencies, a record label that curates esoteric music and imagery from around the world, focusing on Southeast Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Pre-Reception Event
The opening day will feature two exciting events before the official reception:

● 3:00 PM Jan Tumlir Presents Sirens: On Voice Automation (A modulated Lecture)

● 3:30 PM Performance by Insideoutmosphere. Immediately following the lecture, there will be a live performance by Insideoutmosphere, a sound-art duo featuring Reza Monahan and Marcus Herse. Combining modular synths, Persian instruments, and improvisational elements, Insideoutmosphere blends Middle Eastern musical traditions with avant-garde and experimental noise.

About the Artist
Reza Monahan (b. 1978) is an artist and filmmaker who holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Art Center College of Design and a BFA in Experimental Film and New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has produced hundreds of short documentaries on art and architecture, collaborating with institutions such as NASA/JPL, LACMA, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and the Getty Foundation. His speculative art and film projects have been exhibited in galleries and film festivals worldwide, including ICALA, Anthology Film Archives (NYC), UNTITLED Art Fair (Miami), and MiM Gallery (Los Angeles).

Monahan’s work blends questions of language and cinema within time-and-space-based projects to explore ideas surrounding rhythm, light, and design. His practice produces contemporary artworks that emphasize the curvilinear, oblique, volumetric, and active qualities of mediums in high-contrast heat for one another. Through this, Monahan seeks to express what he calls “Meta-Kinesthetics,” a concept that situates him within the tradition of the Haptic—a philosophical state of being that 20th-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty equates to “felt phenomenology.”

About Lazy Eye Gallery
Lazy Eye Gallery, located at YVML, is a space dedicated to experimental and contemporary art, providing a platform for multimedia installations, sound art, and performance. Through its program, the gallery fosters interdisciplinary exploration and dialogue between artists and audiences.

Bios

Jan Tumlir is an art-writer, teacher, and curator based in Los Angeles. He is a founding editor of the local art journal X-TRA, and a regular contributor to Artforum and Frieze. He has written catalog essays for such artists as Bas Jan Ader, Uta Barth, John Divola, Cyprien Gaillard, Allen Ruppersberg, and James Welling. Books include: LA Artland, a survey of contemporary art in Los Angeles co-written with Chris Kraus and Jane McFadden (2005); Hyenas Are…, a monograph on the work of Matthew Brannon (2011); The Magic Circle: On The Beatles, Pop Art, Art-Rock and Records, (2015); and Conversations, produced in discussion with Jorge Pardo, published by Inventory Books (2021). Tumlir has served as a faculty member of the Fine Art and Humanities and Sciences departments at Art Center College of Design since 1999.

Marcus Herse is a German artist, musician, curator, and educator currently based in Los Angeles. His multidisciplinary artistic investigations center on the perception of space and time as (dis-) continuous, the process-driven generation of sensory representations, and the subjective engagement with architectural and utilitarian structures. Influenced by contemporary critical theory, Herse emphasizes embodied cognition and phenomenology, Situationist principles, and utopian architectural ideas. His curatorial work integrates varied perspectives on image production, exploring its connections to representation and perception through a lens influenced by philosophical, scientific, and socio-political discourse. A graduate of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Herse furthered his studies on a DAAD postgraduate grant at the University of California, Los Angeles. Herse has exhibited internationally, and his work has been reviewed in Artforum, Flash Art International, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. He currently directs Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery.

Venue: Lazy Eye Gallery at YVML
57275 Canterbury St, Yucca Valley, CA 92284
Gallery Hours: By Appointment

For additional information, please contact – Heidi Schwegler hms@lazyeyegallery.com