Carrie Moyer

PLUS MAGAZINE: In Timber!, your exploration of environmental and social instability seems to manifest in the materiality of your work. Could you delve into how the use of materials like pumice, powdered minerals, and volcanic rock in your recent paintings reflects or amplifies these themes?

CARRIE MOYER: I’m really interested in the material presence and viscosity of acrylic paint. When I first moved to New York, I was lucky to meet Len Bocour, who developed Magna in 1947 specifically for some of the early color-field painters. Somehow this factoid now feels auspicious! I’m always thinking about how paint operates in terms of speed, flow, transparency, and even what kind of detritus is left as a trace.  For many years I’ve used glitter as a kind of foil to beauty. With this body of work, I’m using natural materials, such as pumice and sand, to mark the movement of the shiny paint. This feels both counterintuitive (polymer meets rocks) AND appropriate as we sit watch over the melting permafrost.

P: Your titles often infuse humor into otherwise serious or complex subjects. How do you see the interplay between these quick-witted titles and the weightier, more introspective elements of your paintings?

CM: I’m not interested in titles that lock down interpretation since my hope is that viewers have both a visceral and conceptual engagement with the way I use abstraction. So, the titles often serve as funny re-framing devices. We’re so accustomed to the seemingly fixed meanings of the Modernist formal vocabulary. A good way to shake things up, or perhaps “queer” the context, is by using oblique, flat-footed, and/or humorous words that circulate around an image but never define it. My wife, the sculptor Sheila Pepe, helps me come up with the titles. She has an incredibly associative, humorous, alliterative way with words.

P: You’ve mentioned that your work investigates large forces, such as geological processes and planetary orbits. How do these cosmic and terrestrial themes influence the formal aspects of your compositions, such as movement, gravity, and stasis?

CM: For this show at Alexander Gray Associates in New York, I’ve been really interested in gravity. Nearly all the new paintings have some kind of impediment built into the surface that attempts (and fails) to channel the paint flow. These stoppages come in many forms — piles of pumice; subtle folds and pinches; miniature “speed bumps;” undulating ripples that form a kind of low-relief ground to catch the paint in various ways. When I was a kid, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to be a dancer or a visual artist. I ended up going the visual route, but the grand, sweeping movements of a modern dancer seem to linger. Most of the paintings are made lying flat on a table, where they can be moved and tilted. Short drying times mean I have a finite window in which to “choreograph” my moves. Because I don’t want the step-by-step narrative of how a painting was made to be easily legible, the images sometimes have a kind of stasis or monumentality. They take a while to penetrate.

P: Your use of abstraction has been described as a vehicle for queer expression and politics. How has this approach evolved over time, especially in the context of your new works in Timber!?

CM: After being immersed in queer agitprop projects, I returned to painting in the early 1990s. Although I probably wouldn’t have articulated it this way at the time, I was trying to retool the high modernism to make space for myself. I was interested in reimagining its strategies and undermining its assumptions from my position on the margin as a woman, a feminist, and a lesbian. This required finding a way to obliquely sully the customs of modernism, such as adherence to the picture plane and the grid, the use of undisguised or “pure” materials, and the rejection of illusion. So, into my paintings came glitter, so-called decorative color, destabilized spaces that combined flatness and illusionism, forms that were neither representational nor abstract but hovered near legibility. Thirty years later, that sense of gleeful contamination has become much more than a critique; it’s a worldview.

P: The tactile quality of your work is striking, with layered compositions that seem to operate on both microscopic and macroscopic levels. Could you elaborate on how you achieve this duality and what it represents within the broader narrative of your exhibition?

CM: I want to slow the viewer down and invite them in so they can look closely. The paintings offer different experiences and types of access depending on where the viewer stands. From afar, the compositions are graphic and seemingly resolved. Getting closer, one starts to see the underlying surface patterns, the slippage of the space, and the emergence of recognizable shapes. Finally, at very close range, one gets the sparkle, the teeming buildup of glitter, pumice, and sand, or the delicate veils of transparent color that make up a pour.