Carrie Moyer responds to life in lockdown

By Chadd ScottApril 1, 20210 Comments

Carrie Moyer, Hell's Bells and Buckets, 2020. Acrylic and sand on canvas, 66 x 60 inches

Carrie Moyer is an artist and writer known for her luscious paintings on canvas which extend the legacy of American abstraction while paying homage to many of its key female figures, among them Helen Frankenthaler, Elizabeth Murray and Georgia O’Keeffe. I pick up Loïs Mailou Jones and Agnes Pelton in her paintings as well.

Moyer’s work proposes a new approach to fusing material experimentation and a passion for the history of painting. In addition, Moyer’s is influenced by a background in design and queer activism.

A new body of her work appeared April 1 – May 1, 2021 at DC Moore Gallery in New York during the exhibition “Carrie Moyer: Analog Time.”

This series served as a recollection of a year spent largely in the twenty-five-block radius of her Brooklyn studio. “Analog Time” references a new sense of time that has fused mind and body, memory and imagination, small and large.

Renowned for her exuberant colors, many paintings in “Analog Time” embrace a muting of her palette, with Moyer embracing grey, navy and deeper green tones that anchor or weave throughout layers of more saturated pigments. Small, tactile imperfections placed on the surface appear granular under opaque shapes, signifying the artist’s hand purposefully disrupting the canvas.

Her large – 66 inches x 60 inches and larger – paintings are composed with acrylic paint and sand and/or glitter mixed in. Biomorphic shapes and colors put on in large blocks abound.

Dating back prior to COVID-19 lockdowns, Carrie Moyer spent time in Italy creating works on paper in the fall of 2019; Moyer returned inspired to further explore the medium’s capabilities for abstraction. These new works on paper are included in “Analog Time.” They were also a direct response to harshness and inequities of life beyond her studio.

When speaking about this body of work, she states, “On paper, my fondness for a comic, sci-fi sensibility turned metaphysical and atmospheric through the repeated process of staining, salting, and spraying the surface with inks and water. Everything is saturated.”