Sam Moyer: Shape Shifters

Sam Moyer | Shape Shifters
January 8 - February 14, 2010
Opening Reception: Sunday, January 10, 6-8 PM

Rachel Uffner Gallery is pleased to present a show of new work by Sam Moyer. In the gallery, Moyer will exhibit sculptures that explore the meeting point between the elevated language of abstract form, and familiar, universally accessible materials and processes. Incorporating photography, drawing and painting into her sculptural practice, the artist creates objects that somehow seem both handmade and prefab.

In a series of wall-hung fabric sculptures, Moyer marries the world of mass-produced goods with the sphere of able, home improvement craftsmanship, approaching them both through a subtractive rather than additive art-making process. Purchasing cheap IKEA rag rugs and picking at each to unravel it into a new composition, Moyer then paints them with a black encaustic. This is a practice both organically homespun, paying tribute to handcrafts such as weaving and the “making do” employment of everyday artifacts, and oddly detached, resulting in an object that might initially seem an untouched relic from planet Minimalism. Taken together, these sculptures form a structural grammar – their similarities marking them as a unified language, their subtle differences defining each as its own iteration.

The interest in overlaying the familiar and quotidian over and against high abstract forms continues in Moyerʼs floor-based triangular sculpture. The artistʼs own black and white photographs are printed and appended to modular plywood constructions, transporting photography and sculpture from their originally savored objecthood into the more tactile, workaday realm of pattern and materiality. This context shifting is also observable in a series of book sculptures. Pocket books – those most personal of artifacts that, at the same time, speak to a much broader cultural framework – are alternately joined together, drawn and painted over, or assembled alongside other found objects. Here, Moyer engages with a sphere that, due to its limitedness, encourages a highly nuanced exploration of her sculptural interests.

Sam Moyer is currently exhibiting her work in “Between Spaces” at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens, through April 5, 2010. She has also exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Cleopatraʼs, Brooklyn, and Max Hans Daniel, Berlin, among other venues. She received her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and her MFA from Yale. She lives and works in Brooklyn.