In reserves, the inaugural exhibition in our new gallery by New York-based artist Grant Mooney, accumulation and distribution are transposed as a series of material behaviors. Circulatory aspects of the building are brought to the fore with Grant Mooney and McIntyre Parker’s collaborative work Untitled, made in 2018. Neighboring the gallery’s utility room, a projector sits on top of a generator while a film clip loops continuously. Throughout the clip’s 27-second duration, objects of a domestic sphere sit unused before becoming obscured by a wash of light, whereby the mechanism of the camera reveals itself. Once powered by stored sunlight, the projected image is now supported by its low construction as a mere intermediary of energy.

On the gallery’s two sides, Mooney has installed Deposition (c.) v and works from a new series, Cation c.(i-vi), where various impressions of an early technology deployed in small-scale metallurgy are cast in silver. The method uses found cuttlebone to carve, pour and cool molten metal in which lodged silver topologies sit amid steel channels, electroplated to varied degrees of silver-to-amber as particles migrate with an electrical current to form new layers on steel surfaces. As a result of what the artist calls “material disputes” between ferrous (containing iron) and non-ferrous compounds, the surface becomes volatile in the moment of contact with air. The metal industry would deem this an incompatibility or a flaw, and art conservationists “an inherent vice.” Encouraged to oxidate and bind with free particles, the metal changes coloration over time, indexing contingent interactions with the gallery environment and the viewers within.

Gain C. (Ampere) ii brings a heightened awareness to the building’s structure and extends a bronze form that recalls sound as substance. Threaded through the gallery’s steel spine, the cast construction enables waves to radiate efficiently and cover a large surface area. It follows the logic of the artist's past engagements with bronze casting, where sculptures that in their initial context produce sound — in this case a sectoral horn, part of an amplifier — consider how slight variables can express a vast scale of immaterial and tonal effects.

A number of iron-embedded cylinders comprised of fat, wax and oxides make up 12 : 0, 14 : 0, 16 : 0 , 16 : 0, 17 : 0 , 18 : 0 , 18 : 2 , 18 : 3 , 20 : 1, a substrate for various abrasive compounds that when solidified, cool to the surface. When applied to a buffing wheel in rotational motion, the active properties of iron and calcium carbonate become a node in a network of treatments to a surface, polishing and smoothing the surface of metals or stone like the tides of a wave. The distributive sculptural elements neighbor a stack of concrete panels that at one time made up the original building's second floor. Titled reserves, by emphasizing the gallery floor, the very basis of the architectural interior and physical support of many of his works, the artist subverts the assumed invisibility and auxiliary role of the ground, embracing it as a gesture of horizontal expansion and circulation, where the panels may become raw materials in the second stage of Midway’s ongoing construction.

Mooney’s work is concurrently on view through August 11th in the Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, organized by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Text: Midway Contemporary