Witness the alchemical assemblages of Grant Mooney’s sculptures, which respond to the materials and processes embedded in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery’s building, specifically the limestone bricks that are the building blocks of the entire Center for the Arts.

The works in calcis center the processes embedded in the building, including the routines and functions in what constitutes its various activities, but also its chemical compositions. Calcium carbonate and its material properties are a foreground of Mooney’s practice while also the core architectural component of the gallery’s limestone brick walls. The exhibition extends into the labor production of exhibitions by utilizing existing physical supports as installation elements within the space.

The Center for the Arts is comprised of hundreds of Indiana limestone bricks which were cast and assembled on site. Limestone is a type of rock formed of crystalline calcium carbonate from deposits of seashells. Calcium carbonate is the predominant chemical compound found in cuttlebone, the cartilaginous internal shell of the cuttlefish. Cuttlebone is used for carving and casting metals within jewelry-making practices. Originally trained in jewelry design, Grant Mooney has used cuttlebone in a number of sculptures, foregrounding the material in exhibitions at Progetto in Lecce, Italy (2023) where limestone is a predominant architectural material, and at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York City (2022) where limestone can be found in the gallery’s floor tiles.

calcis, Mooney’s solo exhibition in the North Gallery of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, continues the artist’s sculptural practice of attending to the hyper-relational way materials shape and are shaped by their proximal surroundings. Working with the received conditions of the space, Mooney’s work departs from the materiality of the gallery’s limestone bricks. 

Though carefully attuned to the social extensions and technological production of this material, Mooney’s approach to sculpture is articulated through forms of ornamentation and touch, paying close attention to the formal and dynamic relationship between often overlooked elements of an environment. For Mooney, artworks are deeply entangled entities. 

For calcis, this attuned relationality is also expressed through the interaction of another active material in Mooney’s practice, light. In his words, light itself has “a material consequence,” transitioning substances in and out of visual presence. In front of the large windows leading into Zilkha’s North gallery Mooney will install sculptures and in the gallery itself, which is partially-illuminated by an ocular skylight, he will suspend a sculpture, activating the vertical axis of the space.

Grant Mooney (b. 1990, Seattle, Washington) lives and works in New York. He studied art at Central Saint Martins, London and California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Mooney’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Progetto, Lecce, Italy (2023), Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco (2023, 2019), Konrad Fischer Galerie, Berlin (2021), Kunstverein Braunschweig (2017), as part of the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Awards at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017), and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2015). His work is included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art and has been included in group exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2022), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2021), Yale Union, Portland (2020), Stadtgalerie Bern (2020), SculptureCenter, New York (2020), Fondation D’entreprise Ricard, Paris (2017), Kunst-Werke Berlin (2017), White Flag Project Library, St. Louis (2016), and Futura Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague (2016), among others.

READING LIST

The following works inspired Grant Mooney in the creation of calcis:

John Roberts, Intangibilities of Form: Skilling and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade
James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
Christophe Benke, Cornelia Kastalan, Valérie Knoll, and Ulf Weggenig, eds., Art in the Periphery of the Center
Johanna Gosse, Timothy Scott, eds., Nervous Systems: Art, Systems, and Politics since the 1960’s
Yve Alain Bois, Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide