When Carrie Moyer and I decided to have a conversation, her recent paintings were already at DC Moore Gallery, where her solo exhibition - now on view - was soon to open. We met there after hours, and over beer and chips, and talked among the works leaning against the walls. There was an odd and disorienting friction to our informal hangout, suddenly set against the backdrop of the well-lit gallery, but Moyer seemed perfectly at ease.
Moyer's work, too, deals with intervention, but its achievement is that fluidity replaces jarring juxtaposition. In this, it reflects her years of experience as an activist who designed public and street art campaigns with Queer Nation and Dyke Action Machine! . In her paintings, flat planar "cut" shapes are interwoven with translucent passages. Craft materials like glitter are contained within gestures we normally associate with heroic abstraction.
The paintings often have symmetrical, overall forms, which are suggestive more than graphic. They are elegant and beautifully constructed, even though they play with the noise and glare of popular visual culture. They seduce us, inviting us to pull them apart, but their construction feels illogical, difficult to tease out of their overall gestalt.
Moyer was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960. She received a BFA from Pratt Institute in 1985 and an MFA from Bard College in 2000. She is currently a Professor at Hunter College. With photographer Sue Schaffner, she co-founded the public art project Dyke Action Machine!, active in New York City between 1991-2008. She has also written extensively about art for Art in America , The Brooklyn Rail , and Artforum , among other publications and exhibition catalogs. She was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum in 2012, and a traveling exhibition, Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny DC Moore Gallery , New York, where a solo exhibition is on view through March 26, 2016.
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Jennifer Samet: You have said that your parents nurtured an interest in art. Where did you grow up? Were there specific experiences you had with art, or specific works of art, which you consider formative?
Carrie Moyer: I was born in Detroit, where my family has longstanding roots. My grandfather was a policeman during the Detroit riots in the 1960s. But I had countercultural parents who put us in a van when I was nine and drove us out to California with all of our belongings. My family lived all over the Northwest for the next 10 years - California, Oregon, and Washington.
My mother was really interested in art and encouraged my sister and me to become artists. She often took us to the Detroit Institute of Art before we left for the Northwest. Diego Rivera’s gigantic fresco cycle, “Detroit Industries” (1932–33), made a big impression on me. I was exposed to a lot of pictures through books as well. A favorite was a book on the Blaue Reiter that included Alexej Jawlensky’s painting, “Portrait of the Dancer Aleksandr Sakharov” (1909), which I thought of as “my painting.” It is intensely colored, filled with feeling, and the dancer looks very demonic and androgynous.
I wasn’t interested only in visual art; I was also involved in various kinds of dance throughout my childhood. I ended up getting a full scholarship to Bennington College to study modern dance. Because I lived in remote places, I was a bit of an autodidact and had done a lot of research on Martha Graham and the history of modern dance. She taught at Bennington; that was where all her ideas came to fruition.
I had to quit after a year because I was in a serious car accident, and wasn’t able to dance for a while. So making pictures and visual art turned out to be what I did. I studied at Pratt. When I finished school I had that horrible year that most art students have after they graduate, where they wonder, “Can I really do this? Do I want to do this? Nobody is telling me to make a painting anymore.” I’d had a couple of teachers at Pratt who noticed my budding feminism and helped me get an internship at Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics . It was the first time I was around artists who were also activists, and it was exciting.
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Read full interview at hyperallergic.com .
