Altman Siegel is pleased to present Of Echo Systems, an exhibition of sculptures, prints and video by artists Shannon Ebner, K.r.m. Mooney and Will Rogan. The three-person exhibition presents artworks that are conceived and developed in consideration of the artist’s environment. The varied surroundings these artists reflect include private and public sites as well as physical, biological and immaterial spaces. Tracking the nature of numerous complex systems, all three artists advance a new materialist approach—one suggesting that the nature of all systems can be more fully understood through an entanglement and relationship to other entities and compositions. These artists ask the question where and how does culture separate from nature and where do we locate the body—as well as consciousness and subjecthood—within this ever-shifting domain.

Shannon Ebner’s photographs, videos, artist’s books and installations imagine the world as a printed surface. Incorporating found elements of text or letters alongside images and objects, the artist points towards the collective and interchangeable qualities of the built environment’s language, conflating seeing with reading. With A SELF, Ebner translates a series of graphic spreads from her recently published book Auto Body Collision into a lifesize screen print incorporating found auto body shop terminology with her own insertions of writing. Exemplifying this in-between state is Ebner’s piece An Unrested Image. The video shows an animated photograph of a rotating, post-op FTM torso in which the body is moving so rapidly that it becomes both a seeing eye and a flexible surface.

K.r.m. Mooney’s sculptures, comprised of various metal alloys and organic compounds, are compositions that lure the viewer with their intricate fusion of cast and found materials. Treating space as a primary material, Mooney aligns each sculptural form to the architecture of the gallery in an ongoing process of reorienting the body of the viewer.

Possessing a background in jewelry making, Mooney considers how these materials might connect to the body in addition to how they synthesize with one another. The artist is interested in these temporal dynamics that emerge between viewer and artwork, and the response of this relationship to a given environment. Will Rogan’s clock sculptures are modeled from wood collected from the artist’s past and present homes. They are fused together with remnants of other found objects, coalescing into meditations of balance and time. His kinetic compositions suggest alternative methods of tracking time, challenging our understanding of the present, past and future.

These works do not reinforce accepted units employed to quantify time, rather they offer a new consideration of how and when we construct chronology, asking the viewer to consider how these objects materialize the immaterial nature of time.

Shannon Ebner (b. 1971) lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include the ICA, Miami; MoMA P.S.1, New York; Hammer Museum/ LAXART, Los Angeles and the Fondazione Memmo, Rome. Group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial, New York; MoMA, New York; the 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art; the 54th Venice Biennale; the Highline, New York and the 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Ebner was recently commissioned by the Hillman Photography Initiative and Carnegie Museum of Art to create her new artist book Auto Body Collision. K.r.m. Mooney (b. 1990) lives and works in Oakland, California. Solo exhibitions include the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Bad Reputation, Los Angeles; n/a, Oakland; Important Projects, Oakland and Pied-à-terre, Ottsville, Pennsylvania. Two-person exhibitions include Hester, New York and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Will Rogan (b. 1975) lives and works in Sausalito,

California. Solo exhibitions include the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley; San Francisco Museum of Art; Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp. Group exhibitions include the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; the Shanghai Biennial; the Oakland Art Museum and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.