under the floorboards
February 15 - March 29, 2025
Opening Reception | February 15, 5-8pm
exhibition text
Have you ever poured molten aluminum into an ant hill? The liquid fills out all the pathways of the colony, little meticulous tunnels that the ants have dug. You clean out the surrounding dirt and you have this single figure of suspended Time and ant labor unearthed from under ground.
Eamon Monaghan’s wall sculptures belong in a lineage of underground artwork from the end of the last century. Underground cartoonists like R. Crumb’s heavily stippled environments are predecessors to Eamon’s clay mark-making. Underground animators like Bruce Bickford’s undulating and melting claymation scenes are predecessors to the movement and malleability of Eamon’s knotted vignettes. This wall work might be what underground theorist Manny Farber referred to as Termite art, methodically chipping away at the composition in darkness, eating its own boundaries, nothing in it’s path other than signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.
Art historian Aby Warburg was looking at the statue of Laocoön and His Sons, when the realization hit him: the sea serpent served a formal function. The snake added another layer of frozen motion to the sculpture. Eamon achieves this heightened momentary quality with smoke or steam or rope. If the sculptures depicted a second later, everything would be in a slightly different position. Lay your eyes anywhere on Monaghan’s work and you got there just in time. You’re accessing an infinitesimally slim moment: A rope pulls a table off balance, the door is about to swing open, sausage tumbles out of a freezer, a hand lovingly places a yellow flower in a vase, or is it puckishly plucking? Steam rises from the pipes.
My studio is near Eamon’s so I peek in on him working sometimes, head phones on, several artworks in processes, an iPad playing the Tour de France or some bicycle race. Think of all the soaring camera work edited to show the unified experience of the bike race, it’s actually a patchwork of perspectives. The linear bike path breaks into a tangle of angles, the road too long, taking days and weeks to complete, impossible to visualize in one image. I think about the invisible path of our digestive system, the most linear of our biological bodily functions. It’s a path with several organ stages, tangling into nests at our small intestines, visualized but never seen under our skin and clothes. The artworks in Eamon Monaghan’s Under the Floorboards are legible but impossible knots suspended on the wall, still sculptures for our busy eyes to animate.
Text by Joey Frank
Eamon Monaghan (b. 1986, Evanston, IL) received a BA in Biology from Carlton College in Northfield, Minnesota in 2008, and moved to New York following his graduation to make art. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Jack Hanley Gallery (2023) in New York, Moskowitz Bayse (2023) in Los Angeles, and The Hand (2017) in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been included in group exhibitions including The Talking Stone at Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles, (2021), City Fever at François Ghebaly, New York (2021), and Horology at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York (2019). His work was included in Artforum’s Top Ten in 2018. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.