Carrie Moyer in Long Island City
Carrie Moyer is an artist and writer known for her sumptuous paintings which explore and extend the legacy of American Abstraction, while paying homage to many of its groundbreaking female figures, among them Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler and Elizabeth Murray. In equal measure abstract and representational, Moyer’s work proposes a kaleidoscopic worldview that embraces the sensual as much the rational. Playful logo-like silhouettes — vessels, towers, portals, meteorological phenomena, plant life, animal and human forms — demarcate arched prosceniums or abstract fields of color. These flattened archetypes and cheeky reference points often perform as compositional rigging around which flow cascades of paint, glitter and light.
I’ve followed New York painter Carrie Moyer’s work for a couple of decades, and it’s been exciting to see her ongoing experimentations with paint, different textures, techniques, and references. I’ve also been taken by how she continuously, in one way or another, brings her feminist and activist politics into her various bodies of work. As a fellow painter, I’m inspired by her radical investigations and her approach to painting as an inquiry.
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Many abstract painters tend to actively engage with art history, rejecting or incorporating prior ideas, including their own. I love how artists’ works can contain that very conversation with themselves; the next generation will then continue it and that keeps the history moving and fresh. In Moyer’s work, for instance, a brushstroke receiving a shadow is one way in which she playfully intermixes abstraction with illusion, thereby subverting the genre’s prescriptions.
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Visiting my peers’ studios is one of my favorite things about being an artist in New York City: I get insight into how others think and explore, and then go to the show that comes out of it. When we recorded this conversation in Moyer’s studio this fall, she was in the middle of working on several paintings in various stages of completion. It’s a privilege to see an artwork before it receives its final touches. I also got to witness how Moyer’s process occasionally involves the computer. She scans her paintings, or creates forms on the screen, then prints them out and moves them around on the canvas, not unlike a Matisse cutout. This was one of several revelations I took away from the studio visit.
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—Bruce Pearson
I’m wondering what’s going on with this new work?​
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I have two paintings that I’m doing that are part of a commission, which are these over here. I’m gonna move the furniture so you can see them. They’re diptychs, which is not a form I usually work in but they need to fit into a particular space in some- one’s home. I’m thinking of them as Carrie Moyer’s greatest hits, since each contains aspects of the work that I’ve been dealing with for a long time, be it landscape or imaginary place, or an approach to abstraction that buries figuration or imagery in it.
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How do you mean, “buries figuration”?
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I’m always embedding things that are recognizable into my pours or large swaths of color. Part of it is to create a treasure hunt for the viewer. It’s very important for me to slow the viewer down and pose questions, like, What do I know I’m looking at, and what don’t I know? And then create this tension that the viewer has to resolve. Asking, How do these things operate? And why are they in the same space? There seems to be this very arbitrary border between “abstraction” or “representation,” which is completely porous at this point, and even using the words feels totally inadequate. I don’t know what those terms are describing anymore.
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I’ve been kind of obsessing about binaries and wanting to just wipe them out in my thinking because they’ve gotten us into so much trouble. Right now, there seems to be a wider acceptance of things that don’t fit into categories; there’s a willingness to redefine things.
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One of the joys of this work is using paint to play with the history of illusion, but also talking to all these other moments in painting history. Flatbed planes, staining, monoprinting, tricky surface treatments, impossible light and shadow effects. The stuff in my bones about modernism rejects the things that give us great joy in painting, like illusion.
What is the atmosphere that you’re feeling? By addressing it and working with it, what are your hopes to be able to deal with that?
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I feel the paintings have a kind of urgency that I really loved about political posters when I was a kid. It’s not like Guernica ever made anybody take up arms. But there’s an urgency around different forms of abstraction that I think are very interesting. They’re encoded in us. I’m consciously schooled in it, but the world is uncon- sciously schooled in modernist tropes around visual things.
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I love your work from the late ’90s and early 2000s with the posters, when you used images in relationship with modernist ideas about paint. In time, you transitioned and dropped overt references to historical graphics and the work became more subtle. Do you feel that your politics carry through in all of your work, even when it’s more subtle?
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I do, but it’s less apparent; it doesn’t look like agitprop. My politics are more front and center in my teaching. In the classroom I get to talk about history, the world, and the current events everyone is following closely. This semester we’re reading and talking a lot about class and race, the feminist art movement, and queer history.
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Do you need to be direct?
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Maybe I need to be direct now. When I started making these paintings in the ’90s, part of the friction was how could I bring the sentiment of the agitprop I’d made for queer organizations and Dyke Action Machine! into the studio. How does one render it through abstraction? When I was working on the paintings you’re referring to, I received criticism for their very overtness. But right now, we’re in a totally different moment historically. Even modes of picturing things, like social realism, that were taboo when you and I were younger are back in circulation because of the times that we’re living in. And they’re totally relevant. It makes me appreciate what I was trying to do in the ’90s, and the fact that it was hard. I had a lot of people older than me saying, “Why are you using these sacred symbols?” A picture of a raised fist, for example—they felt I was mocking their generation. But I really wasn’t, I was talking to my own history, because I grew up around that stuff, and a longing for change.
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Back then, there was a lot of talk about revolution in this country. Change was a real thing and for a long time; there was, as far as I’m concerned, a lot of positive change that happened. And then, suddenly, our hopes got turned on their heads. Now we’re in a brand-new place where I feel that we need a new change. Radical new change.
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Not to cite the internet—I mean, it’s the big boogeyman, always. But how do you circulate an image force- fully, through different populations? When we were younger, there was a lexicon of images that spoke of resistance to a certain class of young people. For example, you’d wear your T-shirt with Che Guevara on it, or what- ever. Now we recognize these things more readily for what they are—soul- less consumer objects. There’s such a broad, random array of images that we all wade through every day. The stakes are just different.
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by Bruce Pearson | September 3, 2024 | Artist Features