Void Filled: "..." at The Hole

Featured in "..." at New York's The Hole (312 Bowery), alongside a selection of "new abstraction" by Kadar Brock, Matt Jones, and Scott Reeder, Sam Moyer shines with her large, tonal paintings treated with bleach and dye. Moyer conceives of each picture as an optical illusion with seemingly woven cloth tainted with patterned strokes that allude to a fluffy duvet, necessary for a city winter, or even Stingel's Oil and Enamels physically folded over to create a pseudo sculptural sense of depth.

Despite the sculptural outcome, Moyer's process of folding and dying, washing and drying is most comparable to such domestic past-times as doing laundry. Moyer augments these canvases with bleach followed by a thorough ironing before mounting the clothe to a panel using a pH-neutral glue. While if stretched like a typical painting, the canvas reads merely as a painting and the remnants of her labors become lost in a sea of pattern and degradation. This gluing of the canvas to the panel creates, according to Moyer, an "object/pedestal relationship that helps keep the work within the realm of sculpture."

Each picture bears a direct relationship to Moyer's photographic process as she creates positive and negative space by burning the dyed canvas with bleach thus mimicking the behavior of light. With a constant fluctuation of color and diffraction, Moyer's pictures page homage to, channeling and nuancing, the power of mid-century abstraction.

All Images courtesy of the Artist, The Hole, and Rachel Uffner.

"..." is on display at New York's The Hole (312 Bowery) from December 16th, 2011 to February 4th, 2012. This was originally posted on paddle8.com.