K.r.m. Mooney’s first solo exhibition at Altman Siegel, “Näcre,” presents a body of work contextualized in part by the gallery’s physical location and the ambient and sedimented information it holds. Pinned between the verticality of the city’s rapid development and the persistent horizontality of the bay, each piece reflexively engages with the site as contingent on subject positions and contact points where the topography of Potrero Hill relaxes into salt water. Processes of acceleration and accumulation are indexed and poetically abstracted as densified forms.

With “Näcre,” Mooney’s objects are based in found structures that support and guide bodies’ industry, in all their valences. They are then amended by hand to implicate the thresholds between presence and understanding – and the bodily knowledge of alloys and alchemy at play. With this focus, Mooney’s work tests the surfaces of meaning to locate where intimacy lies; reminding us of place and the inevitability of our relationship to it.

The exhibition consists of sculpture, varying in scale, that is installed on the floor or sparingly mounted onto the walls and surfaces of the gallery. Occupying the largest surface area, Accretion I rests on the floor of gallery 1, reflecting the height of the gallery’s ceiling in polycarbonate sheets that flex upwards supported by low aluminum arches. In gallery 2 there is a collaboration with artist McIntyre Parker, in which an affecting film clip loops, powered by photovoltaic panels that hang under the skylights above; its environmental impact and spatial proximity countenanced by the spareness of the clip. Both works point to the verticality of the space, whose roof floats far above the top of its walls, and grounds the viewer’s bodily perspective between these barriers.

Other works are built upon trade tools such as an engraving block in En I, a dental mold in i-iii, and a chime in Channel in C. Mooney’s careful recuperation of these industrial sources replicates the tangible and affective efforts that define their utility. These pieces evoke labor histories as systems of knowledge and procedural frameworks for constituting identity that simultaneously call out hierarchies of access. The objects are steeped in practices of collaborative care, where tools and formal considerations link and extend the knowledge and function of one body to another.

K.r.m. Mooney (b. 1990) lives and works in Oakland, California. Solo exhibitions include: Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Reserve Ames, Los Angeles, CA; Pied-à-terre, Ottsville, PA; and The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA. Recent two person and group exhibitions include: White Flag Projects Library, Saint Louis, MO; The Gallery at Michael’s, Santa Monica, CA; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY; 500 Capp Street, San Francisco, CA; A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; and Fondation D’entreprise Ricard, Paris, France.