mtn space and John J. McGurk present, The Moon Is Also a Rock, an exhibition of work by Ben Leone and Renée Phillips. The show brings together two artists who treat the natural world as a record of deep time: one looks up at the moon, the other down at the stone beneath our feet. The moon, so often read as pure light, is a body of rock, and by the leading scientific account it formed from the Earth’s own material.
Ben Leone’s series of seven paintings follows the moon through its phases. Each is made from pure pigment, galvanized steel and silver leaf, the materials of the construction site and the mine. A hand-laid silver form, crisply cut, sits against a ground that looks eroded, crusted and weathered, as if the surface were a landscape. Galvanizing is the building trade’s way of holding off decay; Leone sets it against the moon’s slow waxing and waning, permanence against transience.
Phillips starts from the other direction. Resin sculptures suspend poured paint and metallic foil inside translucent, stone-like forms, drawn from a conviction that rocks are “diaries of earth” that “hold the memories of 4 billion years of Earth,” “the most physical entity on planet earth,” and a way to reconnect with something deeper.
Between them, the sky comes down to the earth and the earth reaches up to the sky. Both artists use reflective metal, silver leaf in Leone’s paintings and foil in Phillips’ resin, to catch light inside forms that read as stone. Both also work with two clocks at once: the lunar month that Leone’s seven phases mark, and the millions of years a rock remembers. The moon is also a rock; the rock, held to the light, is also a small moon. Each is lit, and each casts a shadow.
About the Artists
Ben Leone is a West Palm Beach–based artist whose work examines the evolving relationship between the built environment and the natural world. Drawing on materials used on construction sites, he treats the physical remnants of development as both medium and metaphor, merging traditional fabrication methods with contemporary technologies. Globalization, climate change and accelerated urbanization inform his practice, yet he resists didacticism, inviting inquiry through material presence and spatial tension.
Renée Phillips is a sculptural color field painter inspired by aerial landscapes of Earth. Phillips builds layers of paint in monochromatic schemes or in pools of color poured one atop another, testing oil and acrylic alongside enamel, spray paint and posters ripped from the streets. Through the addition of fire, wind or water, paint is transformed into mountainous, geographic forms. The resin rocks extend that inquiry into stone and the long history it holds. She is based in West Palm Beach, FL.