23 Muddles & Mômo's Magical Murders (2020) Joey Ryken
23 Muddles & Mômo's Magical Murders is a video montage examining the artist's drawing series 23 Drawings to Muddle Magic, as well as dictation-drawings made in magical conversation with Antonin Artaud's drawings from some of his many notebooks. The audio is a fragmented montage of trance induction drones composed for drawing-based psychomagical rituals, or what the artist terms 'Octochronoplasmancy'.
This video is intended as an act of enchantment, and a perpetually imminent means to conjure apocalyptic ghosts. However, the artist takes no responsibility for supernatural anomalies that may occur as a result of viewing.
Joey Ryken (b.1976, Anchorage, Alaska) is an artist based in London, UK. Their art practice and academic research explore experimental approaches to occult magic and hallucinatory experience, using drawing, sound, moving image, text, and absurdist performance. Prevailing research themes include drawing as a process of magical invocation; audiovisual media as hallucinatory witness; and performance as abstracted magic ritual, exploring entrancement within music sub/cultures and intercultural subjectivities.
Ryken has recently completed a PhD in Art Research at Kingston School of Art, titled Bodies of Pure Intensity: Drawing as Magical Apparatus. They perform as guitar-noise avatar Me/Mi MôMo Mu, and is a collaborator in the speculative Boricua diaspora art collective De Nada Unidos. Ryken has exhibited, performed and produced events in idiosyncratic locations throughout the US and in the UK, as well as at major arts institutions in the UK, including ArtSway, Camden Arts Centre, Gasworks, Goldsmiths, ICA, Somerset House, and Stanley Picker Gallery.