June 22, 2015
ArtDaily: "Multiverse at DC Moore Gallery"
Opening Reception: June 18, 6:00 - 7:30 PM
Works by Mary Frank, Mark Innerst, Yvonne Jacquette, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Carrie Moyer, Barbara Takenaga, and Alexi Worth.
The paintings and photographs on view in DC Moore Gallery’s project gallery explore the effects of layering and doubling to evoke multiple worlds. With their inventive imagery and innovative materials and processes, these works play with perception to capture the exciting and unnerving sense of simultaneous potential realities compatible with the concept of the multiverse.
Alexi Worth investigates the sensory anomalies of near-at-hand experiences in paintings created by spraying color over hand-cut stencils on mesh fabrics. In Florida Iced Tea (2015), irregular contours and a palette ranging from winter-white to sunburn comprise a semi-nude bather, an archetypal art historical subject. Mark Innerst likewise experiments with optical effects, particularly the prismatic possibilities of light. In Quartered Landscape (2014), overlays of landscape imagery interrupt atmospheric pastel skies, while cloud forms echo across horizontal and vertical axes.
In a recent body of work, Mary Frank uses photography to record ephemeral installations that she stages by combining components of her sculptures, works on paper, and paintings. A clay limb in Root (2009-2013) seems to grow into the earth alongside cutouts of luminous figural and vegetal forms. Three untitled black and white photographs from the mid-1960s by Ralph Eugene Meatyard also reveal connections between man and nature. The artist locates his young children amidst peeling plaster, rock striations and bright leaves, and the tangled geometries of a fallen tree. The images, suffused with a palpable sense of time and place, blur the distinctions between reality and make-believe.
Yvonne Jacquette’s newest painting, Snowy and Rainy Rooftops (2015), depicts a composite view of a low-rise cityscape with twinned water towers in winter weather. As in her white-line woodcut prints, the predominance of opaque black effaces detail and confuses depth by upsetting the conventions of positive and negative space. Barbara Takenaga also creates ambiguities of space and scale in compositions that explode outward and recede to infinity. The metallic acrylic paint in Blue on the Horizon (2013) creates the impression of a hypnotically shifting, otherworldly landscape. Tipped-off by the title, the colors and forms of Carrie Moyer’s abstract painting Puddy Tat’s Lunch (2011) might seem inspired by a certain cartoon bird and cat. At the same time, Moyer maximizes the multivalence of verbal and visual language to suggest female anatomy with raw canvas and curvaceous line.