re.riddle

by means of: liz moore

August 1-31, 2021

By Means Of is a solo exhibition of new work by Liz Moore that will run from August 1 - 31, 2021. This is part of re.flect, a program series that spotlights one of the gallery's artists each month. Each show will offer in-depth access to the respective processes and practices of our global artistic community. In addition, each artist has partnered with re.riddle to release limited edition, unique works at special prices. These exclusive pieces will only be available during the month of their related exhibition. 

 Curatorial Statement

Describing her large-scale, sculptural fiber works as enveloping the viewer, American artist Sheila Hicks asserted, “You’re not thinking about the grains of the sugar. You’re into a very big meringue, like a huge lemon meringue pie.” Rich materiality has an immersive quality, a multi-sensorial effect that crosses the threshold of the physical into the psychological. These vivid, tactile experiences give rise to questions pertaining to the spatial interplay between physical objects and emotive states of being. How do material, color, and form relate to bodies that exist in the space around the work? Moreover, how do specific aesthetic choices engender and bring about the notion of affect? In her exhibition, By Means Of, Liz Moore tests our bodily capabilities of empathy and focus through the tactility, vibrancy, and shape of her natural fiber – a medium with a heavy-laden past. 

Intuitive and playful, Moore lets her artworks self-determine as she subverts expectations of materiality. While Moore honors wool’s material tradition by adopting sustainable needle felting processes and materials, she deliberately and methodically misuses the medium to recontextualize it, increasing the distinction from wool’s crafted, utilitarian history. She over-dyes and strips the wool of its natural aesthetic, dips entire swaths in paint, and flips them back and forth from finished and unfinished sides to obscure the methods of their making and ensuring the impossibility of their functional use. Often finishing with confronting combinations of found objects such as faux flowers (Untitled, A Sweep), plastic brooches (Untitled, A Cloud in the Past), or beads (Untitled, Hair Picks), she creates an unintuitive experience. 

While her newer works may be smaller in scale, their effect is the same: in blurring all forms and moments of normalcy with the unexpected and nonsensical, Moore pries our minds open, simulating opportunities for openness to the unfamiliar. In other recent experimentations, Moore takes up the meditative focus of Agnes Martin’s striped paintings (A Note to Agnes series), blurring the boundaries between painting and fiber sculpture. This unique handling of fiber reveals the material’s ability to attract and repel light and to move like suspended paint pigment. Carefully embedded in these moments of the unexpected lay the potential for seeing the world anew, mapping paths to empathy.

The dynamic nature of Moore’s sculptures is demanding of our time and attention. The works are fabricated with the content for an internal (between textures and colors) and external (between artwork and viewer) dialogue, but they require the time to converse. Like the fiber artists of the Arts and Crafts movement, reacting against mass-production and mechanized industrialization with an emphasis of by-hand craftsmanship, Moore uses her materials to question if our digitally-altered minds are capable of spending the time to properly look at anything anymore. The work tests our ability to behold in a physical environment. Moore casts fiber mediums once again as paralleled protagonists: a product of industrialization and the means by which it is resisted. The aftereffects of this duality continuously familiarize and then defamiliarize the viewer to Moore’s experiences and ideas. By means of Moore’s manipulated fiber of soft, physical materiality and twisted forms, we are reminded of the cross-dimensional effects of objects on the human body and the reality of our cognitive malleability.

Programming

Presented alongside the exhibition will be programming about Liz Moore's creative process and practice. 

Studio Visit with Liz Moore x Curator Gretchen Wagner
Tuesday, August 10 at 5:30pm PST/ 7:30pm CST/ 8:30pm EST via @re.riddle Instagram Live

Curator Gretchen Wagner speaks with contemporary artist Liz Moore about her creative practice inside Moore's artist studio in St. Louis, Missouri. 

Gretchen L. Wagner is a curator, art historian, and writer based in St. Louis. She has completed projects featuring modern and contemporary art at institutions internationally, including the Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, WIELS Centre d’Art Contemporain, Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, The Print Center, Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, and Williams College Museum of Art, among others. Her projects explore diverse themes including, the investigation of global abstraction and conceptualism, art and the environment, and the intersection of public and institutional space. Most recently she organized the exhibitions Graphic Revolution, a look at the social history of the United States through the lens of printed art, and The Shape of Abstraction: Selections from the Ollie Collection, which celebrated abstraction by contemporary black artists, both at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Wagner holds degrees in Art History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Williams College.

Artworks

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