Artist Reception: Saturday, September 6, from 5–7pm
Municipal Bonds is pleased to present Interstice, an exhibition of sculptural works by Yvonne Mouser, on view in the gallery's Annex from September 6 through October 25, 2025. Mouser's practice spans conceptual art and design, and often involves a central exploration of time and transformation. In this exhibition, she turns to thresholds—sites where one state slips into another, where structures express moments of change. The works—cabinet, bench, table, and stools—retain their function even as they operate as sculpture, reflecting her sensitive engagement with material and process, and her attunement to the elemental forces that shape them.
Mouser's investigations—between states of what has been and what is becoming—are grounded in experimentation and rigor. Wood is split and joined, metal shaped and oxidized, paper punctured and layered. Each gesture carries the imprint of earlier decisions, balancing construction with destruction, and situating her practice in the charged space between emergent form and disorder. Her systems of assembly suggest growth, erosion, and the accumulation of temporal states.
Interstice, for Mouser, is both literal and metaphorical—an architectural interval, an ecological frontier, a metaphysical crossing. Familiar structures shift through material intelligence, addressing questions of environment, perception, and duration. At its core, her practice reflects on how form holds a record of time: a hinge between permanence and mutability. The act of making connects to longer registers of cosmological change, aligning human construction with elemental properties and processes. Her work creates a balance between order and flux, precision and chance, built form and natural metamorphosis.
This dynamic is embodied in Janus Spiritus Cabinet, a matrix of adjustable white oak fins painted in sumi ink and arranged around an altar-like core. The fins align into a continuous vertical plane or pivot to admit air and light, at once an enclosure and an opening which can be positioned between order and disarray. Surfaces shift with illumination—grain and texture reading as scaled black by daylight, while in the darkness of night, the cabinet becomes a lantern, casting striated patterns across space.
In Modulations, a dissolving mass of charred-wood surfaces unfolds from one end to the other—large, dense elements giving way to smaller, more fragmented structures at the opposite. Its angled alignment and textured grain heighten the effect, as order breaks into a fractured geometry of planes, forming a bench that conveys both solidity and impermanence.
The Hadean Disk Pedestal Table continues this exploration, pairing a cellular cross-section in copper-patinated steel, luminous with mineral blues and greens, with a carved, sumi-inked wood base—projecting above and below to unite the top and the foundation. The accompanying Hadean Stools echo this relationship, their intersecting patinated steel planes suggesting three-dimensional cells at the instant of formation.
On paper and mylar, Mouser's inquiry turns quiet and attentive. Moon Rock Series, a constellation of punctures, recalls geological surface and celestial mapping. The works propose perception itself as a mutable terrain, where seemingly destructive actions, instead, give rise to new form. Light glints through its apertures, shifting across matte and reflective planes so that the drawing seems to breathe—details surfacing, dissolving, and reforming with each change of angle or hour.
