Tidepools in Transmutation: On reserves
A sensorial walk through K.R.M. Mooney's solo exhibition at Midway Contemporary Art
I walk into K.R.M. Mooney’s reserves, Midway Contemporary Art’s first official opening since construction began to remodel the building purchased in 2022. While construction was not tied directly to the show, Mooney chose to reference the construction, which makes me feel like they are considering their connection to the transformation, from the building’s former lives as ice cream shop, limousine garage, into the arts space it has become, but also gesturing towards the unknowable–what it may become.
I am greeted by volunteers/interns offering postcards with an artist bio, a floor plan of the gallery, and the works. The table includes drinks of the summer–a Hugo spritz sounds nice, maybe an NA beer.
I’ve been drawn to the project as it has unfolded. I have witnessed the staff operate machinery to dig away at the earth beneath, knocking down walls to sand and clean and finally open the space into the modern, eco-conscious, gloriously stark container for contemporary artwork that was envisioned. During the pandemic, Midway closed the doors to its gallery, and moved its library to a temporary home, while they pursued a series of “Off-Site projects” through 2022. While the Off-Site projects were each as incredible and substantial as any show, it’s good to see them return to a home.
For me, Midway Contemporary Arts is a beacon of thoughtfully curated artwork (typically visual arts, but not always) that is a true gem in the region. The standards of artistic excellence are rivaled only by institutions with far larger budgets and in much larger cities. The programming is robust, engaging, including an extreme attention to detail in terms of concept–either challenging or timely conceptual elements the artists bring–or context. The artists whose work they select and position within the landscape of the Twin Cities arts scene or national/international communities are thoughtfully considered.
Full disclosure: I’m a long-time supporter of Midway, receiving an extremely warm welcome to the space by the Deputy Director herself even before I moved to the city. Midway’s approachability, humility, in combination with the roster of exceptionally talented artists and collaborative installations, always leaves me in awe–it is a rare thing to accomplish one of these aspects as an arts organization, let alone all of them. Since moving to the Twin Cities in 2016, I have volunteered with them regularly, and interned in their (equally potent) arts research library for over a year. You can often catch me in a supporting role at a benefit, helping set up or tear down.
[Walking into the gallery]
I like to approach artwork without much context, if any at all. I enjoy cataloging the sensations of being moved, to document the places my body/mind takes me in response to a visual work or a dance. I am interested in a poetic experience from a brusque or immediate place, and so I create these feeling and sensation lists which operate like poems.
I encounter the first sculpture in reserves–dripping chrome, molten book cover, rivulets and lines drawn through the piece as if Mooney had superimposed his own fingerprints onto the metal itself. I recall him saying he comes from a metalworking background, learning somewhere near Seattle.
Silver metal bending flexibility reflection distorted like a funhouse mirror
Pearl finish mounting bracket
Left side fingerprint stamped into the work
Massage digits into dripping metal
Duality frozen between sleek and stamped coolness of elemental mineral, and undulating underlying sonics within
Ribbon-like, pushing-pulling thumbprints
Gentle hammer caressing blacksmith
Silverfish curling away
A bubble, something opening up - something sinking through
Rivulets a ripple
Sunlight reflecting on spinning areas like hubcaps next to lime wash
Folds of paper
Free and weightless
Simultaneity of lead, and edible foils - vespers in air
A weathered book flying away - paraglider vision, in suspended horizon
I met Mooney while volunteering at Midway’s benefit the previous weekend to support Midway’s public programming. This one served to also commemorate the opening of their new permanent home with design architects “B+.” Everyone I encountered felt present, excited but grounded in looking ahead at the oncoming opening. Grace and decorum, humility and respect. Mooney is cordial and sweet. He makes me feel like I could say just about anything that would illicit a chuckle. While his work takes me through a psychic wash cycle on heavy duty, he makes small talk feel easy–which is not so easy for me.
Jagged gum wrapper chrome tin foil lift off paper airplane hang glider
Melting
Cylinders scattered across the floor like scrolls or sticks of dynamite.
Their names like drilled core sample of chemical elements in stasis.
Concrete and cedar
Sulfur player piano scrolls resting on the ground, diplomas made of matchstick heads
Pieces of the former floor rest on top of one another like the most impractical benches
Hollowed-out marking of time - something past - transitioning into something new, something yet to be
Themes of alchemy torn manuscript - transcendence - reckoning
The soft and hard qualities of Mooney’s sculpture remind me of chewing gum foil, like it might be blown from the pearlescent mounts if I’m not careful with my breath. A bio states that Mooney, “pursues a distinct form of abstraction that focuses on the interactions of objects, bodies, and space… The artist’s background in foundational metalsmithing techniques informs their investigations into the structural capacities and potentials of these materials, as well as the effects of time, temperature, and adjacency.” Adjacent, indeed–we are next to… as the viewer, am I rubbing up against, existing in boundary, or passing through? I think it must be all of it at once.
Cuttle bone electro-plated steel
Cascading beads rigid dew drops gold
The creases and folds of your skin and bones
Imperfection in blown glass
Electromagnetic rainbow
Rust like desert
Rust like water
A tablet
Bone as talisman reading the echoes like tea leaves
I continue to slip into personal reverie and greet each piece. Each of Mooney’s silver squares another title in the object library of our lives–mine, his, Midway’s. There’s a sensation of connection, transmission, of object realities overlapping.
A room somewhere far from here, projected onto the wall
Adjust my eyes to the floor
Wavering hand
We are always in conversation with those who came before us
Those who pass through the same rooms we do
With what has stood in the spaces in which our bodies currently occupy
These deposits of mineral and pieces of former floor stacked on top of one another, a recycled sculpture, crafted by Mooney’s hand and forklift, connect it to the building’s past as a soda parlor, or garage… This is transcendence, a nod to a former incarnation, and the welcome mystery of its sculpted current form calls in a brilliant future, and ever-refined awareness. Water saws that cut through concrete and pulled slabs from the earth to be recycled–thank you. All times present in the gallery above and below, the rooms into which we (you, me, Mooney) have passed are also here in space and time.
Flounder empties out my stocking, paves the garage floor with my essential mineral…
Scrape the inside of an abalone shell hiding behind the concave, dark side of the top row of my teeth
Tongue against the roof of my mouth.
I imagine mixing chalky smoothie
I see your hands at work.
Plastic buckets in hand, goggles covering your eyes.
The hair on the back of your palms and chemical substrate resting on your cuticles, the slurry splashing on your boots, and slowly over a year or two, burning a small hole in your overalls
This living garage an excavation of self -archeology studying the present
It’s all relevant in our intertwined histories
Nothing is relevant in our intertwined histories
This index lovingly crafted from the overlapping circles where we’ve walked, paced, entered a room or exited for the first time or the thousandth.
K.R.M. Mooney: reserves is on view at Midway Contemporary Art through October 5, 2024. More info →