Film
featuring Sepand Shahab & Liam Mooney
Mail Art
about the art
Assembled Histories brings together works by Liam Mooney, Sepand Shahab, and Marsian De Lellis. Each artist pursues ideas that move beyond usefulness or institutional sanction, allowing intuition, speculation, and fixation to function as method. These works demonstrate how sustained immersion in obsession can generate expansive structures when ideas are carried past reason and into the realm of the absurd.
As an unlikely pre-concert lecture, experimental academic Sepand Shahab opens with a video lecture that operates within what he calls “fake musicology.” Sepand proposes that inspiration is a valid source of knowledge and, through an imagined genealogy of Gregorian chant, he leads us along a speculative historical path, and suggests that invention, misreading, and intuition can generate new forms of artistic insight.
The film then takes that inspiration and cuts to performance by instrument designer and builder, Liam Mooney, who constructed a vacuum-powered PVC pipe organ that only he is able to play. The instrument produces dense, unstable masses of sound, with low tones emerging and receding from within the instrument, while higher pitches surface unpredictably. During a performance, Liam continuously tends to the instrument, adjusting and responding to its volatility. His care, control, and fixation are integral parts of the work.
The visual art, Model Killer, is an imagined scene from a larger installation puppet theatre piece by Marsian De Lellis. By using puppets, dioramas, and performance, Marsian proposes that fixation can be both a creative and a destabilizing force. Their darkly comic narrative, centered on a dollhouse maker who constructs miniature crime scenes in an attempt to impose order, justice, and meaning, examines what happens when meticulous craft collides with moral distortion.