K.r.m. Mooney at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts

Artist: K.r.m. Mooney

Exhibition title: en, set

Curated by: Anthony Huberman

Venue: CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, US

Date: June 25–August 1, 2015

Photography: Johnna Arnold, images courtesy of the artist and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco

San Francisco, Calif., May 29, 2015—The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts is pleased to present en, set, an exhibition of new work by Oakland-based artist K.r.m. Mooney (b. 1990, Seattle), June 25 through August 1, 2015. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Trained as a jeweler, K.r.m. Mooney is interested in the porous materiality of objects, bodies, and spaces. Through a sequence of abstract object-based networks, the artist incorporates the materials of previously organized systems—electrical conduit, clarinet keys, metal alloys—and mobile agents such as moisture, plant life, chemicals, and elemental compounds. Inspired by the writings of post-human and new materialist feminist thinkers such as Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, where “matter is neither fixed and given, nor the mere end result of different processes,” Mooney’s reconfiguring of post-industrial materialities causes them to take on sensitive and provisional forms. The objects seem iteratively mutable, prioritizing affinity over identity, and are invested in the turn toward trans-subjectivity, embodiment, and nonhuman and cyborgian forms of agency.

By infusing the minimalism of industrial fabrication with the affect of a contingent body, the works enact a material and spatial discontinuity: garment care labels share a material body with polyurethane tubing and specialized elements such as titanium jewelry; lavender and dried citrus skins are cast in silver or bronze and soldered onto tin cans or reconfigured through elongated stemlike forms; precious stones are affixed onto sections of polyvinyl conduit; aquatic tank heating components fit into a jeweler’s vice; and electrical splicing materials settle into new decelerated forms. The artist asserts sculpture’s capacity as assemblage in the chemical sense: the works push forward the alchemical properties of materials by conceiving of them as migrants, fluid and unordered forms that pass through, inside, around, and near each other, thereby becoming of each other. In that way, they perform acts of attachment, in the physical, chemical, sculptural, architectural, and also affective senses of the term. Mooney’s sculptures are physical incarnations of difference—fractured forms that disrupt and unrest existing systems of legitimacy, authority, autonomy, and use.

Although most works are presented on the floor, recent works have been attached to pipes running along the ceiling or placed in plastic bins or on vinyl sheets. In the same way that bodies are organized by the spaces they inhabit, Mooney’s sculptures are in close dialogue with the space in which they are shown. For the Wattis Institute, the artist conceives an installation of objects and architectural interventions.

K.r.m Mooney’s work has been shown at Important Projects and n/a, in Oakland; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco; Hester and Grand Century, in New York; and Bad Reputation and Jancar Jones, in Los Angeles. Mooney received a BFA in jewelry / metal arts from CCA in 2012.