mo munley: portfolio

“The voice is an action. It has no location in the body except when it is in action sounding.”

-Catherine Fitzmaurice, Breathing is Meaning

Caroline and Bella’s Voice Warm Up, 2018

Single channel video installation

5 min

Bureaucracy Is Not Personal, 2018

Single channel video installation

8 min

Want to Sell it That’s a Good Incentive I Can’t Get it Out of My Head, is a text interpretation of a sound piece in which an audio sampling of property pornography is used as the basis to construct a rhythmic composition through fragmentation. The script is re-configured with emphasis placed on repetition, without designating a speaking subject. By eliminating the gendered power dynamics typical of property pornography, the text resists male desires of ownership, the failures of which have propagated the resurgence of this genre of pornography in recent years and emphasizes the urgency of consumption as a persistent residual compulsion in the American imaginary.

Installation Image, Sitting with Clara Rockmore, 2017

Single channel video installation, optical theremin, projector

4 min

Sitting with Clara Rockmore, is a video installation in which an analog optical theremin plays in real time with the image of Clara Rockmore. Part music, part sorcery; the theremin is an instrument powered by two antennae that determine pitch and volume from the proximity of the player’s body. Clara Rockmore, a musician who studied under the instrument’s creator Léon Theremin, popularized the instrument in the late 1930’s. Despite Clara Rockmore’s vital contribution in popularizing the first electronic instrument, her story is often overlooked in the history of electronic music.

The Clara Rockmore images that appear in the video are downloaded from the internet, printed, scanned, developed in the darkroom and then assembled as collage. The impermanence with which her image exists insists on a kind of fragility in their placement and visibility and each step in processing creates distance from the image that came before it. As Clara’s image transforms into sound, I move from subject to object. In giving her voice a new body, I am conjunctively absorbing the history of women in the arts; a history of invisibility, of sexual objectification, and of rigid control of body movement and behavior.

Installation Image, Sitting with Clara Rockmore, 2017

Single channel video installation, optical theremin, projector

4 min

Untitled (Sitting with Clara Rockmore), 2017

Single channel video installation, optical theremin, projector

4 min