Featured in “…” at New York’s The Hole (312 Bowery), alongside a selection of “new abstraction” by Kadar Brock, Matt Jones, and Scott Reeder, Sam Moyer shines with her large, tonal paintings treated with bleach and dye. Moyer conceives of each picture as an optical illusion with seemingly woven cloth tainted with patterned strokes that allude to fluffy duvets necessary for a city winter, or even like Stingel’s oil and enamels physically folded over to create a pseudo-sculptural sense of depth.
Despite the final sculptural look, Moyer’s process of folding and dying, washing and drying is most comparable to domestic activities, such as doing laundry. Moyer augments these canvases with bleach followed by a thorough ironing before mounting the cloth to a panel using a pH-neutral glue. If stretched over a frame, the canvas reads merely as a painting and the remnants of her labors become lost in a sea of pattern. This gluing of the canvas to the panel creates, according to Moyer, an “object/pedestal relationship that helps keep the work within the realm of sculpture.”
Each picture bears a direct relationship to Moyer’s photographic process–she creates positive and negative space by burning the dyed canvas with bleach, thus mimicking the behavior of light. With a constant fluctuation of color and diffraction, Moyer’s pictures page homage to, by channeling and nuancing, the power of mid-century abstraction.
“…” is on display at New York’s The Hole (312 Bowery) from December 16th, 2011 – February 4th, 2012. See The Hole’s gallery page on Paddle8 here.