Carrie Moyer “Seismic Shuffle”

Mary Boone Gallery (Midtown)

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With Seismic Shuffle, Moyer invites us to the psychic interval between dormancy and the incipient rumblings of a new age. Teeming with loamy colors of the forest floor, these eight paintings evoke associations of elemental energies that both extinguish and rekindle.

A celebrated artist, Carrie Moyer has been making abstract paintings with stains and pours since the early 2000s. To begin, she creates small collages from Color-Aid paper. Drawing with the blade of a razor, she builds up shapes to form spatial relationships. Kaleidoscopic colors of brown, grey, purple, and green serve to delineate the composition. In the transfer of the configuration to painting, Moyer pours acrylic paint in a time-based procedure. The choice of media pulls the muscularity of plastic and craft into the composition, while the choreographed process heightens the opening up and closing down of the surface.

In these paintings, lattices feature prominently as devices that ratify and adhere to the plane of the painting. Pours of paint optically shuttle back and forth against this scaffolding. Simultaneous readings of this flatness offer a shifting point of view. One may look both down and through these devices to see the grounds of materially deep, rich color. In Totem Before the Event Horizon, a lush, mossy backdrop is split in two by a glowing slab of light. Additionally, in Hot Metal Twice, the gravitational flow of liquid paint is studded with the volcanic eruptions of encrusted glitter. The range of textures - slick, matte, flat, chunky - cause the background to step out from the pictorial field into actual space, while the color slicks pool into biomorphic forms. Moyer’s paintings, in their reference to a geological time, serve as physical ballast to our contemporary barrage of data. These works gesture to the past while providing a material anchor for the present and a push towards the future.

Carrie Moyer’s recent exhibitions include the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Three Graces: Polly Apfelbaum, Tony Feher and Carrie Moyer at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse (2015); and Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny which originated at the Tang Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, and traveled to the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, and to the Canzani Center Gallery, Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus (2013-2014). Moyer has received awards from the Guggenheim and Joan Mitchell Foundations, Anonymous Was a Woman, and Creative Capital, among others. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.