6/16: THE DRIFTLESS MOMENT / new work by ABINADI MEZA

Abinadi Meza. Still from Hour Between Dog and Wolf, 2013, video

What are these moments of disembodied consciousness, archival film footage from long-forgotten movies that you play for me? There is an eye connected to a mouth, roving through and telling me what I am seeing, and it speaks as a robotic voice, a machine imbued not with a personality but with a repetitious playback of my once-removed thoughts. What is true? What is false? Am I wo/man, machine, cyborg being or other? I ponder these questions as I hear this continuous loop of a monotone voice spouting text. It’s adrift in my mind, restless, echoing, vibrating. And it’s just passing through me. And it’s arriving—here, there and nowhere at all—to, at and for you.

For his solo exhibition The Driftless Moment, curated by Alicia Eler, Austin-based artist Abinadi Meza presents two videos in which he splices up and relayers these archival moments, which embody distraction, listlessness and memory without a hint of nostalgia. He will transform the gallery space into an installation of disembodied consciousness. This exhibition marks the North American premiere of this new body of work.

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ABINADI MEZA is a writer, sound artist and filmmaker who was born in Chicago and is currently based in Austin. In the summer of 2012, Meza was a resident at ACRE, and he notes that this experience provided him time and space to write, record and start the scripts for these films. Meza has also been an artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and Medialab Prado, Madrid. His work will be included in the upcoming Texas Biennial (a video/sound installation) and the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale (a site-specific sound art project). He studied writing, art and architecture, graduating from SCI-Arc in Los Angeles in 2009.

More information about Abinadi Meza can be found at abinadimeza.blogspot.com.

ALICIA ELER is a writer, art critic and curator. She is a Staff Writer at Hyperallergic, and a contributing critic for Artforum.com and RAW Vision Magazine. This is her fourth and final Spring 2013 exhibition with ACRE.

More information about Alicia Eler can be found at www.aliciaeler.com.