Venice, California
King Studio
“Moment of Perception” (on view through February 23, 2025) features works by three artists—sculptors Gregory Mahoney and Eric Johnson, along with Roy Thurston—who share a focus on what artist and gallerist Linda King refers to as the “ability to stop or slow down time in order to fully engage the viewer’s experience with their work and create a complete moment of perception.” Sculpture is conventionally seen as something that freezes time and isolates a moment, but it can also embrace temporality and its accompanying flux. Because the works of Mahoney and Johnson acknowledge their underlying processes, I prefer to think of them as objects that not only slow but also animate time, and space.
Taking almost diametrically opposed approaches, Mahoney and Johnson demonstrate rigorous, meticulous control of their selected materials and processes. In fact, the level of craft they achieve plays a major part in the appeal of the wall-based works presented here. The viewer’s attention is initially drawn by the surfaces of these objects, which are detailed and sensuous, employing color in a delicately restrained range. These characteristics generate active, intense, and sustained acts of looking.
Considered a second-generation Light and Space artist, Johnson is inspired by a wide range of influences, including wave patterns, DNA structures, and nebulas. He has made customized car bodies for the Porsche 962 and overhauled vintage cars and trucks. As he’s said, “I’ve translated all that automotive knowledge into making my work. I use the full array of auto tools and pigments.” He has engineered tools such as gimbals to experiment with gravity and experimented with math, physics, and chemistry, using resins, woods, and pigments to develop a sense of depth, reflective surfaces, and the appearance of delicate, potentially changeable structures under an elastic skin. His materials—with their constant contrasting of the organic and the synthetic, their cycling through transparency/opacity—create a space of tension between visible and invisible. The play between what’s perceived and what’s concealed gives the objects a tactile embodied richness.
Mahoney’s work could be said to “make itself” as he collaborates with natural processes such as oxidation, erosion, and evaporation. These agents are applied to steel, aluminum, found, and natural materials within minimal structures. The surfaces continue to change as the works are exposed to light and air. Mahoney has created tools to core into the salt flats in Death Valley and has collected ocean water to corrode and change his metal surfaces. His work engages with a kind of cartography, producing a referential space that compels one to think about representations of the land, the cosmos, and different systems of belief.
Mahoney and Johnson make arrestingly appealing works, but that quality is the least interesting aspect of what they do. Both allude to something beyond notions of beauty. Their objects express the methods used to generate them while addressing the grand processes of nature and the inevitability of entropy.
