Mohanna, Nickolas, 1979-

Nickolas Mohanna (born 1979), American artist and composer based in New York. His interdisciplinary practice utilizes a variety of media to explore and blur the borders between music, sound art, video and drawing. Within his compositions there is a "tendency of sculpting and orchestrating a minimal array of sounds into sonically rich and spacious atmospheres." Most of the sounds are sourced from local environments. While certain tracks "bury melodies in multiple layers of distortion to reveal their latent chromatic richness through gradually mutating textural contrast." And the "consistent tone makes it all flow together like raindrops forming a lake." In a Village Voice interview, he remarks that his aim is to create an "immersive stereo space where the sound would be reduced to its rawest form." In addition to these works, he has also published a number of artists' books which have served as visual accompaniments, conceptual ideas, or graphic scores to his sonic practice on the imprint Run/Off; which he founded in 2014. Mohanna attended San Francisco State University and went to the University of California, Davis for an MFA in Art Studio. While there he took courses with Bob Ostertag, Annabeth Rosen, Douglas Kahn, and Wayne Thiebaud.