Art & Object Fall Fair 2024

In the Studio

teeth, suggesting connection and vul nerability. Moyer speaks of finding incidental inspiration for these in a Robert Brown ing poem she happened on, titled “By the Fire-Side.” It was, she recalls, “in a passage where it’s sort of talking about ferns clinging to these wet stones and falling off, but with their leggy leaves, they manage to hold on. They represent hope and growth and life.” She says, “I’ve always been interested in that idea of ferns clinging for dear hope and life and pushing through this stone wall— their willingness to cling for their life.” The well-crafted words in Browning’s subtle, moving depictions are echoed in Moyer’s images themselves, as in this passage: Does it feed the little lake below? That speck of white just on its marge Is Pella; see, in the evening-glow, How sharp the silver spear-heads charge When Alp meets heaven in snow! On our other side is the straight-up rock; And a path is kept ‘twixt the gorge and it By boulder-stones where lichens mock The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit Their teeth to the polished block.” The series consists of 10 stone paint ings collectively titled “Clippings.” The sensitive images evoke strings of snak ing ferns that act to document a plant’s new growth and maturation. But, as in all of Moyer’s works, these trigger many other associations, such as spear heads, the spinal cord, and those teeth. Real nature intrudes on art here, with the spaces between the stones allow ing light both to emerge and penetrate and to hint at the potential for tran sience and shape-shifting. And art itself intervenes in areas of gestural painted abstraction in the background. Moyer gives her materials consider able leeway to speak for themselves. As she told Ross Simonini in an interview for a recent monograph on her work, she doesn’t do any modeling for her stone pieces. For the large works, she tries to move all the stones herself on dollies or, working with only one assis tant, stands on a ladder and directs peo ple to move pieces as images occur to

Installation shot Clippings , Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.

appear to be. The photos are set in art ist-made aggregate concrete frames embedded with stones collected from the beach at Orient Point, on the East End of Long Island, which is also the location of the eroded sea walls depict ed in Moyer’s images. These photos have the effect of trompe l’oeil paintings; stone-like shapes filled with natural and industrial materials seem to jump out at the viewer. We sense the weight and energy in the pieces of brick nes tled in the detritus left over from a fac tory that was washed away over time. The formations merge to unite nature COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SEAN KELLY NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES. PHOTO: GARY MAMAY (3)

and industry, Moyer says. “It represents a manmade invasion into nature.” The artist’s four-and-a-half-year-old son, Arthur, who joined us in the gallery, recalled how he named the series of prints “Hard Messages,” explaining, “I hate hard messages.” In the final room, we encounter one of the leading actors in Moyer’s work, the fern itself. It stars in a series of small stone-paintings devoted to its growth and development. Relation ships are spontaneous. Even the trian gular points of the backgammon sets echo the points of the ferns and of the

Clipping 11 , 2024.

Clipping 5 , 2024.

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Fall 2024 | Art&Object