Eamon Monaghan

Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present Where’s My Chicken?, Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker Eamon Monaghan’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. In Where’s My Chicken? sculptural wall works invite the viewer to shrink themselves and explore his world. Three of the works explore homes; in the fourth, the artist brings us somewhere even more personal, the body's inner workings.

In the domestic scenes, the rooms are anything but still. It is dark outside, the rain falls, and what should be a quiet, empty apartment is activated by unrevealed figures’ hands reaching in to turn on a light switch, sneakily steal a large soda with a cane, or pull a rocking chair back to release it into motion. These hands are searching and meddling in a world that is alive, the undulating floorboards and television cord blithely intertwining; an anthropomorphic set of hands reach out of a television’s static to adjust its signal. These uncanny life-like qualities, glowing under the diegetic noir lighting and paired with a charred domestic life, bestow a mysterious eeriness that the viewer can observe from different angles. In Night Stomach, Monaghan has unveiled the mystery of how the body works with vehicles transporting food down the ill-kempt road that is our digestive system. Monaghan’s humor and playfulness shine clearly in this work. The ambiguous and ever-present hands catch falling food and turn on a light to reveal beans cascading from a pickup truck into an unspecified dark body cavity.

Monaghan’s use of materials - paint on epoxy clay modeled over cardboard, tinfoil, and wire armatures on wood - enhances the expressive motion of these works. The layering process makes for glowing surfaces, and the cartoonish use of scale imbues the work with character. Monaghan’s work questions what happens in the dark spaces that we cannot see. The answer is it’s very much alive.