Seduction, Subversion and Chromatic Extremes with Carrie Moyer
This feature is the fourth installment of the collaboration I did with the uber talented Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg who shot these images and came with me to six contemporary artists’ studios in Brooklyn. The previous visits can be found here, here and here.
Carrie Moyer has been creating abstract paintings for more than 20 years. Her pieces are loaded with color, charged with seductive textures and they lure viewers into her rich inner world. Her most recent body of work is primarily comprised of acrylic-on-canvas pieces although she also incorporates glitter in some of them, and plays with other media creating collages, monotypes, digital prints and screenprints. Lately she has been experimenting with frescoes and created a series of them which we had the opportunity to see in her studio.
Actively showing with CANADA Gallery since 2003, Carrie has also been the recipient of many grants and awards throughout her career. And this year was no exception; she won the 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship which is presented each year to a select group of scholars, artists and scientists on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.
I love Carrie’s passionate discourse about feminism, women in the arts, making it big as an artist, being an art professor (besides her already very impressive résumé Carrie is Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Hunter College); and the underlying social, political and cultural issues that come with all of this. As a pioneer of gay and lesbian rights, between 1991 and 2008, Carrie and photographer Sue Schaffner formed the Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!); an interventionist public art projects that dissected mainstream visual culture by inserting lesbian images into commercial contexts. They were very ahead of their time.
Prolific and fascinating Moyer will exhibit some of her outstanding pieces in a traveling show called “Pirate Jenny”. The exhibition will be on view at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio from February 6 through May 1, 2014 and the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia from June 24 through October 12, 2014.
We all loved the time that we spent immersed in Carrie’s seductive, beautifully accomplished, prismatic artworks. Her generosity and her fearless spirit made our visit even more enjoyable. Now that I know her, I will be (in)patiently waiting to see one of Carrie's shows next year.