Carrie Moyer: Analog Time

Carrie Moyer

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Carrie Moyer

A N A LO G T I M E

D C M O O R E

G A L L E R Y

Hell’s Bells and Buckets, 2020 Acrylic and sand on canvas 66 x 60 inches

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Seed Release, 2021 Acrylic, sand, and glitter on canvas 66 x 60 inches

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Galaxhymne (Galaxy Hymn), 2021 Acrylic and glitter on canvas 66 x 60 inches

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Split Infinities, 2020 Acrylic, sand, and glitter on canvas 78 x 96 inches

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Pet My Leaf, 2020 Acrylic and glitter on canvas 78 x 60 inches

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Zaftig, 2019 Acrylic, graphite, and glitter on canvas 66 x 78 inches

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Reverie (There’s a Hole in My Bucket Dear Liza), 2021 Acrylic and glitter on canvas 78 x 96 inches

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Rosewater and Brimstone, 2020 Acrylic, graphite, and glitter on canvas 78 x 60 inches

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Orange Zone, 2021 Acrylic, sand, and glitter on canvas 66 x 60 inches

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Analog Time THIS HAS BEEN A YEAR OF DOUBT. Every day I wake

startled to recall that my world has been completely remade in a confluence of two very different, but longforeseen crises. Part suspended animation, part a galloping expansion of the universe, it’s been all about negotiating the mobius of interior and exterior, micro and macro.

It turns out that a studio, especially when occupied alone, is an excellent place for a lockdown. My studio routine was mostly unchanged by the arrival of the virus.

Instead of traveling to Manhattan to teach, I became intimately acquainted with the 25 blocks between my studio and apartment. The pleasure in becoming radically local was quickly overshadowed by the brutal impact of Covid 19 on the neighborhood. My corner of Brooklyn spent months in the Orange Zone. The privilege of having a space to retreat to is not lost on me.

Unlike people who doubled down on social media during the pandemic, this unexpected pause has exacerbated the schism I experience between real life and cyberspace. Nuanced communication is hard enough in person; Zoom reduces that process into a self-conscious

Analog #3, 2020 Mixed media and collage on paper 25 1⁄2 x 19 1⁄2 inches

performance filled with missed cues and exaggerations.

Having the time and space offline for reflection has been one of the surprising gifts of the monotony.

Rarely, during this, our annus horribilis, did the Covid death toll stop reminding us of our own relative

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insignificance. Rarely did it stop underscoring the disproportionate impact on black and brown lives. And more, after the first months of Covid mourning, we saw the institutional racism that George Floyd’s murder made so plain. In all, Americans were put on notice, forcing white people in particular to take stock of our own advantages. In the midst of this soul-searching, pandemic restrictions demanded that we pay close attention to the simple mechanics of daily life. Holding onto all aspects of new foci has called for nimble minds.

None of it could be solved by “logging on.” Analog Time.

The last thing we need right now is endless hype about the breakthroughs made by individuals “isolated” by Covid. The reappearance of that clichéd character of the 20th century — artist-as-first responder — would be laughable, if it weren’t so predictable. If anything, I find bearing witness to the pile up of indecencies and injustices has made me more circumspect about the limits of art, painting in particular.

In the studio, the pressure to step up to the moment felt like a kind of art school boobytrap. I re-entered the Analog #4, 2020 Mixed media and collage on paper 1

22 x 14 ⁄2 inches

studio with a wish to find an ease with working on paper. I’d spent the previous fall in Italy, figuring it out collaboratively. Now was the time to retreat into my own abstract realm. Pressurized by the world outside the studio, I reinscribed my compulsion to imagine a space completely. Interleaving passages of ink, gouache, and collage, the works on paper veer toward

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Analog #7, 2020

Analog #8, 2020

Mixed media and collage on paper

Mixed media and collage on paper

22 1⁄4 x 15 inches

18 3⁄8 x 13 1⁄2 inches

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Analog #9, 2020

Analog #2, 2020

Mixed media and collage on paper

Mixed media and collage on paper

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28 x 18 ⁄2 inches

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25 1⁄2 x 19 5⁄8 inches

a more fantastical, legible representation than anything I’ve made in years. Scenes are depicted using concrete imagery grounded in illustration. On paper, my fondness for a comic, sci-fi sensibility turned metaphysical and atmospheric through the repeated processes of staining, salting, and spraying the surface with inks and water. Everything is saturated.

Many of the paintings in this group are marked by a “down-shift” in palette. Greyed-out hues slip in where sunny, unadulterated colors once had been. Without the familiar open passages to aerate the image, some recent paintings have a chromatic density that is nearly claustrophobic. For works such as Cosmic Shiva [p. 25] and Hell’s Bells and Buckets [p. 3], the gesso was dusted with very fine sand to create a gnarly, destabilizing surface.

Opaque shapes appear to be pasted rather than brushed onto the pebbled residue in the same way vinyl signage might adhere to a rough wall. Forms that began as narrative cues on paper — low-hanging orbs, giant seedpods, limp-wristed stalks, knobs and truncated bulges, gritty clouds — morph into analogs for feeling on canvas.

Abstraction is experiential for me; my work is a conduit for emotion. The year has been a slow-motion stumble

Analog #6, 2020 Mixed media and collage on paper 211⁄4 x 14 7⁄8 inches

between rage and tenderness and back again, triggered each time I walked by refrigerator trucks filled with our dead or noticed how clean the air had become. From painting to painting, this show is a record of sensation.

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In analog time the mind and the body are one. The eye travels between projected imagery and memory. Rangy conversations with Sheila Pepe — covering everything from the viscosity of paint layers to the entrenchment of New York-style “transaction thinking” to our mutual love of the Great British Baking Show — might begin in the studio and unfurl into day-and week-long threads.

We are both exceedingly grateful not to be alone.

On these daily walks, I find myself parsing the identity politics of the 80s and 90s and today. I try to find the old language we used for what we now call “intersectionality.” I chart the distance between the feminist scholars and artists who taught me to look critically at the world and views and interests of my students. I reflect on the advantage of my white skin, the changing perception of my lesbianism and the persistence of my working-class roots. I think of when there was no digital time, how we organized using landlines and Analog #5, 2020 Mixed media and collage on paper 24 x 211⁄4 inches

phone-trees and when the burnout set in around us.

Culturally we are again at such a moment where the great need for social justice is clearly visible – there’s a relief in knowing that we all see it again. Many of the expectations are now expressed in digital time.

We continue to work in a hybrid.

CARRIE MOYER, Spring 2021

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Cosmic Shiva, 2021 Acrylic, sand, and glitter on canvas 66 x 60 inches

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Carrie Moyer CARRIE MOYER’S SUMPTUOUS PAINTINGS explore and

Analog Time (2021) is Moyer’s third solo exhibition with

extend the legacy of American Abstraction while simul-

DC Moore Gallery, having previously presented Pagan’s

taneously paying homage to many of its seminal female

Rapture (2018) and Sirens (2016). Other previous

figures, among them Helen Frankenthaler, Elizabeth

museum solo shows include, Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny,

Murray, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Imbued with a wide range

that originated at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs,

of art historical precedents, Moyer’s compositions refer-

NY and traveled to SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA,

ence Surrealism, Color Field, and 1970s Feminist art,

and the Columbus College of Art and Design, OH (2013);

while still creating a contemporary vision that is uniquely

and Interstellar, at the Worcester Art Museum, MA (2012).

her own. Both knowing and playful, her work presents

Group exhibitions include, Three Graces: Polly Apfelbaum,

the viewer with a stylized natural world, influenced by

Tony Feher, and Carrie Moyer, at the Everson Museum of

her background in design and queer activism, and mixed

Art, Syracuse, NY; Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen

with evocative, bodily forms, transparent veils of aqueous

Frankenthaler, at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis

color, and flat surfaces. Unable to escape the stresses and

University, Waltham, MA; and Agitpop!, at the Brooklyn

tragedies of the past year, Moyer’s latest body of work

Museum, NY, all in 2015.

features a visual density of shapes, and, in some cases, a more subdued, grey-toned color palette. The new paintings expand her oeuvre while remaining grounded in abstract forms. As Moyer explains, “Abstraction is experiential for me; my work is a conduit for emotion.”

Widely exhibited in the United States and Europe, Moyer is recognized as one of the most distinctive, powerful, and thoughtful painters of her generation.

Moyer has received awards from the Guggenheim and Joan Mitchell Foundations, Anonymous Was a Woman, and Creative Capital, among others. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections including, the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North

Moyer was most recently featured in the museum

Carolina, Greensboro, NC; Whitney Museum of American

exhibitions Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles

Art, New York, NY; and the Worcester Art Museum,

for Trying Times at the Portland Museum of Art, ME

Worcester, MA. Moyer attended Pratt Institute (BFA),

(2020), which will travel to the Museum of Art and

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College

Design in New York, NY (2021), One Night Only in Dallas,

(MFA), and the Skowhegan School of Art. She is a

TX (2019), Queer Abstraction at Des Moines Art Center,

professor and the Director of the MFA Program in Studio

IA (2019), and the 2017 Whitney Biennial Exhibition.

Art at Hunter College.

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D C M O O R E G A L L E RY 5 3 5 We s t 2 2 S t re e t

N e w Yo r k N Y 10 011

dcmooregallery.com

212 . 247. 2111

Published on the occasion of the exhibition C A R R I E M OY E R: A N A LO G T I M E D C Moore Gallery, April 1 – May 1, 2021

© DC Moore Gallery, 2021

Analog Time © Carrie Moyer, 2021 ISBN: 978 - 0 - 9993167-2- 6

Publications Manager: Sabeena Khosla l Design: Joseph Guglietti Printing: Brilliant l Photography: © Steven Bate s

cover: Hell’s Bells and Buckets ( detail ) , 2020 Acrylic and sand on canvas , 66 x 60 inches

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D C M O O R E G A L L E R Y

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