K.R.M. Mooney at Miguel Abreu

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The problems of material convergence remain testament that the world is not entirely plasticked. That you can't just glue anything to anything. A reminder that while we can impregnate kittens with panda, injection mold ears on mice, we still have screws holding a world together. Bones stitched with bolts. Medical grade screws. The world is dumb and full of pipes rusting. There may never be a technology to solve this.  We may never invent a better substance than this. 

K.r.m. Mooney at Altman Siegel

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Cady Noland's handcuffs were jewelry for metallized wrists, about how we attach people to a world. A pearl sets off the clavicle. SFchronicle called them "spiritless" after getting it correct that"their relationship to the body is part of the art." And the gallery wears them, their wreckage as jewels. Lack the imagination to see the institution as the digestive body that it is. The engraving block shown here is intended to anchor small fine things to the earth. So they can be manipulated into delicate forms. Here - without its rubber base - untethered, a listless buoy weighted. In the other room copper bite plates allow you an orthodontics to ground yourself in the case of electrical storm as well as wear the institutions like bling: the white walled architecture clenched to your teeth like a grill. Some of Paul Wall's grills cost $30,000 but these walls cost more.

See too: Lucy Skaer at MRAC, K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre

K.r.m. Mooney at SFMOMA

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I have screws in my skeleton, in my wrist. Subcutaneous cords run inside a vein and into my heart, twisted into pulsing ventricle walls. Two circles of gold lain over my flesh. A warm box accumulating metal glits. When a body is cremated and the ash swept up remain the metal trinkets, hips, bolts, shrapnel, medical devices, occasionally kept, sometimes recycled, or collected in bins and sold for scrap. Attaching titanium to skeleton, or adhesive to pvc to iron, there is an abjection in disparate material being attached, touching, screwed together. Imagine screwing a titanium knee to David, imagine screws entering his white marble repairing him, the cords of a pacemaker set just beneath flesh and the skin moving over eventually eroding through and erupt bloodlessly inside now outside. The jeweler's dilemma is how to connect gold and stone, the doctor's bone and foreign object. The material problem of attachmenting. Things aren't made to go together but we force them too. When the battery is low, the packemaker whistles from inside its warm box.

see too: K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre, Sam Anderson at Rowhouse Project

AR: K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre

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Originally Posted: November 26th, 2015
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre

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Mooney born a jeweler makes sense, apart from its decorative function, the "setting" of jewelry is key, the holding of an object, the micro-fetish of attachmenting objects presented and the problem of material convergence, of which Money is all about. All this relating to our cyborg bodies. Of weirdo materials reminding us of things stranger than ourselves. The most typical aspect of the various object orientated is that we conceive of our body in relation to it, feel our meat as sinew and rod connected. Like the decorative decorates its thing, not the finger but the person atop flesh.

See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet