Hydraulics is a book of drawings by artist/composer Nickolas Mohanna, a continuation of a series that mirrors various sound compositions with an economy of gesture at its core. Investigative in nature and playful in form, the drawings point to a working process of the artist as a sound maker.
The visual work documents an applied force of the ink or manipulation of sound; a circular motion may indicate the amplitude of a sound wave or the bleeding of ink on the page as a heavy drone. The essence of the mark-making reveals a time and place while acting as grounded connections to reality in an age of the hyper-virtual.
Nickolas Mohanna is an artist and composer based in New York. His interdisciplinary practice employs a variety of media to explore and blur the borders between music, sound and sculpture. Many of these works are produced with little or no hardware but with environmental sounds, the portals of the Internet. He has released numerous experimental recordings, on labels such as Karlrecords, Preservation/Longform Editions (AU) and Aagoo (US). He is also the founder of the publishing project
Run/Off; with which he has collaborated with many visual artists, composers and writers.
