Today we’d like to introduce you to Reza Monahan. Them and their team share their story with us below:
Reza Monahan 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 San Francisco Art Institute. Having produced several hundred short documentaries on art, architecture, and related fields, Monahan’s media and filmmaking practice has taken him to cities throughout North America, partnering with institutions and journals such as NASA/JPL, LACMA, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Mike Kelley Foundation, SculptureCenter, Dezeen and many others. His work for SCI-Arc Channel has been supported by grants from organizations such as the Getty Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Monahan’s installation art and speculative films have exhibited in galleries and venues across the globe including, UNTITLED Art Fair, Miami, ICALA, LAGE EGAL Gallery, Berlin, OR Gallery, Vancouver, Anthology Film Archives, NYC, Karma International, Zurich, Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles, and MiM Gallery, Los Angeles. Most recently he co-curated and featured work in an exhibition titled “SPLIT DIOPTER” at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Hard to say whether or not the road has been smooth. Everything is relative. I don’t think it’s really been a road that I’ve been on… more like an urban pinball machine that I’ve been IN. One that continues to traject me into a myriad of vivid and occasionally blinding directions. In some instances lighting up the landscape with bizarre projects, materials and ways of working and in others, spinning me into an abyss of odd and engaging ideas. It’s always been a collaborative effort. Both in my documentary productions, featuring the topography of obscure personalities and practices around L.A. and beyond, and in my artwork – having the honor of collaborating with incredible minds such as my partner, architect Ghazal Khezri or musician Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls and art theorist Jan Tumlir. Never a lull. Never a dull. Moment. Splintered identity only subtext. The sublime, one cracked chandelier away from a swinging good time.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
My studio blends questions of language and cinema within time-and-space-based projects to unfold ideas surrounding rhythm, design and phenomenology. This is done to produce contemporary artworks that underscore the curvilinear, oblique, volumetric, active and temporal qualities of mediums in high-contrast heat for one another. In turn, I attempt to express what I like to call “Meta-Kinesthetics,” placing myself within traditions of the Haptic, a philosophical state or being 20th-century French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty equates to “felt phenomenology.”
Contact Info:
- Website: rezamonahanstudio.com
- Instagram: @superlowrez
