NYAB Event - Nicholas Moore “My Haven”

Nicholas Moore “My Haven”

Tenri Cultural Institute

This event has ended.

Nicholas Moore’s art incorporates fun colors and found objects such as beads, sequins, buttons, and lego pieces, that while engaging us through its humor, nevertheless treats a very serious and universal problem; the search for home. Whether this is a real destination, or a place in his heart or mind, Moore looks for it as a way of completion and source of pleasure. In creating images such as Womb one of 25 small panels that contain text Moore revisits the familiar mother symbol and all important-source. Moore covers his backgrounds in scratched out text that reference quotes from songs, at times containing the artists’ random thoughts, or his musings on home and memory. In the case of the subway travelers Moore conjectures narratives for his subjects’ aspirations imagining them traveling from home or work. As if, coming from or going to a place of belonging like Odysseus to whom he obliquely and subtly sometimes refers. Moore’s textual backgrounds relate to his subject while having the ability to stand on their own as statements, but also as individual words that carry great impact. Using text as texture, while alluding to the individual within or separate from society, Moore feels release into the great void.

Moore deals with the displaced souls who travel from one root to another, becoming metaphors of transience while seeking a final destination. In Moore’s works Odysseus transforms into a guide figure leading travelers through obstacles in the Hades of life. His protagonist holds a sextant, a device used by ancient mariners with which, to find their destination, accordingly his subway riders search through maps.

Ancient and modern, mythology and non-fiction come together in Moore’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place, a votive window hanging created out of embossed copper representing everyday objects that act as apotropaic talismen. In his statement Moore likens it to Penelope’s tapestry with which she was able to keep the many suitors in abeyance until her beloved came home. So that, this conglomeration of objects that range from a relief of an eye or leg, arm or heart, hang together via thread and seem to be like an immigrant, between a rock and a hard place. Above his head appears a sword that like the one of Damocles suggests the fragility of life. While in these votive nets objects come together to become vessels of memory, it must be remembered that it is usually these very pieces that we abandon when departing the comfort of home.