A Sign for Fake Space

“In my work, there’s a playful relationship to some of the most traditional and clichéd imagery of painting, such as landscape, flowers and female figures. It sneaks in there in humorous ways. When it shows up in the work, I embrace it: yeah, those are boobs in there.
I’m also interested in breaking conditions that are supposed to go with certain kinds of painting. For example, a flat, Greenbergian abstraction would never include shadows. Tacky! The space in a Hans Hofmann painting is made through color. I like to have illusionistic space and flatness in the same painting. Somehow this goes back to working as a designer in the advent of the desktop computer. In the old days, before people designed everything on a Mac, nothing had a “drop shadow.” The drop shadow is an invention of Microsoft. It is a sign for fake space.” [Carrie Moyer in conversation with Jennifer Samet]

“Her formal innovations are no less significant. Perhaps most impressive is the elegance with which she collapses into each canvas the major dichotomies that have defined Western painting from the Renaissance to last week. Moyer has switched all the “either/or” oppositions to “both/and” statements: color and drawing; depth and flatness; negative and positive space; figure and ground; figuration and abstraction. Her work is also both market-friendly and political. This inclusiveness gives her paintings, for all of their historical references, a strong sense of speaking to the current moment, when the need to hold seemingly opposed truths at once has become a necessity for remaining sane. ” [Julian Kreimer on Carrie Moyer]

“Well, one thing that had become increasingly important to my work is an involvement with art history—particularly the history of painting. Being in dialogue with artists of the past is really important to me. However, I feel the need to “name that passage” in relationships or references like I did when I was younger. For example, this one passage in the painting “Cold Mountain,” we looked at this morning ended up being a direct quote from Elizabeth Murray, whose work I admire immensely and whose images are somehow buried in my brain. The other goal I had for this work was to make the pictorial space much more complex. I wanted to get away from these yards and yards of flat color. In May I visited northwest New Mexico for the first time. The trip reaffirmed my interests in rock formations, minerals, and crystals. Different versions of that blazing turquoise sky appear in quite a few of the paintings, in particular “Midnight at the Oasis” (2011)” [Carrie Moyer in conversation with Phong Bui]