This iteration of “Reading and Listening by Moonrise,” taking place in David Horvitz’s 7th Ave Garden and curated by artist/writer Vanessa Holyoak, explores nighttime ecologies through a series of readings and performances that consider how undefined and opaque conditions are heightened by the night. Artists and writers will share language and sound that is in conversation with the invisible links between natural events such as oceanic tides, celestial bodies, and the electromagnetic fields within the space of the garden, offering an occasion for collective listening under the light of the full moon.

Reading & Listening by Moonrise is a seasonal series held on the eve of the full moon (or as close to it as possible), featuring performances and immersive sound experiences with multidisciplinary sound and performance artists, writers, and poets. This program offers listeners moments of reflection, connection, and joy within a community-centered green space.

ABOUT THE CURATOR
Vanessa Holyoak is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary writer, artist, and researcher. Their writing and visual art practices bridge art criticism, hybrid fiction, lyrical nonfiction, intermedial installation, and photo poetics to take up questions of cultural and ecological disappearance from a queer diasporic perspective. Holyoak is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative media and culture at USC, where they are researching the queer liberatory potential of nocturnal states of indeterminacy across contemporary Asian diasporic and Francophone art, writing, and film. Holyoak's first novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark, published in 2023 by Sming Sming Books (second edition and ebook 2025), explores the longing for forestial darkness in an era of hyper-illumination. Holyoak’s writing has been published in Artforum, ASAP/Journal, AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research, & Exhibitions, BOMB, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, East of Borneo, e-flux, frieze, Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, TURBA: The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation, and elsewhere. Select exhibitions and residencies include the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, CalArts, Columbia University, Cove Park, Casa Lü, Harkawik, Human Resources, LA Artcore, Monte Vista Projects, Millay Arts, Plot 田, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Hans Kuzmich is a Belarus-born, Los Angeles-based artist working across transmission arts, media installation, and performance. His practice tunes into the acoustic and electromagnetic environments of borders and carceral sites, developing a trans, diasporic listening methodology oriented toward abolitionist horizons. Attending to the technical infrastructures and political and ecological networks that constitute each site, his work engages them speculatively across past, present, and future.

Youna Kwak was born in Seoul and resides in Los Angeles. She is the author of two books of poetry and two books in French-to-English translation. Her poems, essays and translations can be found in American Poets, Boston Review, the Chicago Review, The Conversant, Harriet, Hopkins Review, the Los Angeles Review, The Offing, and other journals.

Jenny Lin is Graduate Director of Curatorial Practices and Associate Professor of Critical Studies in Art and Design at University of Southern California. She is author of Above Sea: Contemporary Art, Urban Culture, and the Fashioning of Global Shanghai and the award-winning exhibition catalogue Picturing Global China. In 2024, she curated the exhibition Another Beautiful Country: Moving Images by Chinese American Artists and produced a related special edition publication with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. As the 2024-5 Tsao Family Rome Prize Fellow based at the American Academy in Rome, Dr. Lin conducted research toward her new book and exhibition project: New Silk Threads: Art, Fashion and Creative Collaborations across China and Italy. Her writings (spanning art and design theory and poetry) appear widely, for example in Art Margins, Shanghai Culture, Frieze, Flash Art, X-TRA, ArtReview, and several anthologies.

Relational is Dana Berman Duff and Shirley Tse. They initiated this collaboration for the project The Universe Breathes Us in Reykjavik, Iceland in 2025 and in Los Angeles at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in 2026. Individual authorship is suspended in installation, video projection, sculpture, sound, photographs, texts, and songs that are made in continuous dialogue with each other. Relational also collaborates with other sound artists and musicians. Alan Duff Berman is their most frequent collaborator.

REFRESHMENTS BY
Coming soon.

ACCESSIBILITY

Parking & Arrival
Street parking is available on the main boulevard and residential side streets. Check posted signs for street sweeping restrictions and parking limits. We recommend using public transportation, and the nearest bus lines are the 35, 38, the LADOT Dash Midtown route). Areas of the garden are very wild at the moment, and it is thus not accessible by wheelchair.

Restrooms
There is a restroom available across the street on the second floor of a building only accessible by staircase. A temporary event staff person will assist in escorting you to the correct location.

CREDITS
Reading and Listening by Moonrise is generously supported by Accelerate Resilience Los Angeles (ARLA).

Contact the host of Reading and Listening by Moonrise