baseball on the radio

February 11 - March 11, 2023

Opening Reception: February 11, 6-8pm

request preview

press release

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Baseball on the Radio, an exhibition of new works by Brooklyn-based artist Eamon Monaghan. This exhibition is the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery and will be on view from February 11 – March 11, 2023. We will host an opening reception on Saturday, February 11 from 6-8pm.

Building a world, like listening to a ballgame on the radio or writing a description of food, is a collaborative, trust-based endeavor, necessarily incomplete. In Baseball on the Radio, Eamon Monaghan offers sculptural reliefs activated by richly painted surfaces and carefully staked outer edges. The works are self-contained, with diegetic light sources, reflections, and weather patterns originating and resolving discretely within each object. They are not closed circuits, though: meaning springs from the artist’s connected metafictions, and expanded truths are gleaned piecemeal. Monaghan’s reliefs provide the viewer with much information, but, like radio, not everything.

People are scarce, for example. A gentleman floats alone on a road-bounded lake in Fishing at Night, an unseen motorist zips through the downpour in Rainy Sunset, and that’s it. We’re made to wonder at the absurdist groundskeeper who clipped out the limbs in Topiary Garden, the legions typing away in Skyscraper, and what the voice crackling out of the radio in Table thinks about that catch in shallow left field. Like the completely built sculptural sets that furnish the artist’s ongoing video practice, specificities of scale prove deliberately fungible, and the viewer becomes a potential – maybe necessary – participant in the work. We are encouraged to shrink our bodies and sit under the wilted streetlamp in Park Bench.

These considerations of scale and form are bound up with Monaghan’s use of material. Made of painted epoxy clay over cardboard, tinfoil, and wire armatures on wood supports, the works’ stippled surfaces and condensed frontal perspectives give consistent texture and shape to Monaghan’s categorically elusive vignettes. Applying painterly strategies to sculptural forms, Monaghan’s objects remain distinct from, and exemplary of, both traditions. It’s here that notions of trust and truth return, as Monaghan’s perspectival maneuvering and egalitarian renderings of water, steel, brick, wood, and grass feel more generous than illusory.

Indeed, we might recall our own experiences with scenes, buildings, and benches just like these – and the limited vantage afforded to us in those unremarkable encounters. But the artist’s promise is one of expansion; in firmly setting the terms of our access to his world, Monaghan expands our capacity for seeing our own. 

download pdf

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 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). Monaghan’s debut solo exhibition, The Rube’s World, took place at The Hand in Brooklyn, NY (2017). His work was included in Artforum’s Top Ten in 2018. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY