NYAB Event - Jazz-minh Moore "Is That All There"

Jazz-minh Moore "Is That All There"

Lyons Wier Gallery

This event has ended.

Moore's new series of paintings features her sister, Asia Kindred, amidst the ruins of a deteriorating cabin. The primarily naturalistic pallet is infused with distortion and bright color, causing the compositions to hover between physical and psychological space.

The cabin depicted was the first structure built on the land where the artist was born, deep in the Oregon woods. Over the years, Moore has watched the dilapidated structure fall into a nest-like geometry that she finds beautiful. The external post and lintel structure has given way to the kind of forgotten, mythical space that a teen might build her fort in; a space wherein secrets can be told and tasted, where the patchy, uneven ground is both soft and solid. It is within this context that Asia is found squatting, or absentmindedly doodling on the fallen boards with a sharp stick. The cabin and the girl are inextricably linked through overlapping compositions. In some of the works, such as 'The Tower', Asia is almost entirely camouflaged amidst a patterning of light and tattoos.

The idea of aligning one's own experience symbolically with gods in mythical fables is prevalent in Moore's new body of work. The work speaks obliquely to the artist's disillusionment with monotheistic and patriarchal codes within Western culture. Throughout these paintings, physicality is dominant in the materials, subject matter and process: wood on wood, sex, cutting, and nature. The birch surfaces that inhabit the work also have a voice within the compositions.

Utilizing the wood grain as a landscape to influence her compositions, Moore leaves some sections unfinished, while others are highly rendered. The level of completion is an evolving collaboration between the artist's hand and the organic drawing 'style' present in the wood panel itself. Some surfaces are finished with a high gloss resin. Others are left bare. The surface treatment is reflective of the subject matter within each work.

Through a combination of tattoos on her sister's body and archetypes carved into the wood panels of the fallen cabin, Moore creates a personal pantheon of gods to reflect her experiences. These divinities, including a pair of snails in slow fornication, a blue-faced Kali, lines from a Jenny Holzer projection, a sculpture of a laughing pig with a coin-slot asshole by Matthew Weinstein, Medusa, Ouroboros, performance artists Eva and Adele, Lady Rizo, and an inextricable tangle of vines, connect as beings in Moore's quest for a new iconography.