For the Artist Sam Moyer, Inspiration Was Set in Stone

New York Times

2 days ago

In a world so full of distractions, Sam Moyer's art tricks us into paying close attention.
The 42-year-old artist, the subject of two high-profile exhibitions in New York, once stacked dozens of hand-painted glass blocks in the window of a downtown New York art gallery to make it look like a solid red brick facade. From inside, backlighting brought each individual brushstroke into focus, revealing the material's masquerade.
A few years earlier, at a gallery show in 2014, she affixed fabric dyed to resemble geological formations to slabs of marble. It was nearly impossible to tell which surface was which without walking right up to the wall. 'I don't want to say it was a gimmick, because it wasn't coming from a place of a gimmick, but it was definitely trying to pull something off,' Moyer, dressed in overalls and a T-shirt, said on a recent afternoon. In the front room of her studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, stone slabs in shades of gray, pearl and peach lean against A frames; it looks more like a granite supply store than an artist's work space.
Moyer is a trickster — but a very mild-mannered one. Over the past 18 years, in large-scale installations and modest objects, she has provoked a what's-going-on-there response from the viewer, to 'bring an awareness to the land or the space or the light or your body that you wouldn't have had before,' she said. She first drew the attention of art-world tastemakers in the early 2010s, when she began showing dyed canvases she had made by dragging a piece of fabric the length of a school bus through a field on Long Island and leaving it out to dry. Cropped from the huge swath, the final works evoked rumpled bedsheets, light-dappled surfaces and variegated stone. 'A lot of people said, 'It looks like marble,'' Moyer noted. On a 2013 visit to the Rothko Chapel, the nondenominational temple in Houston created by the Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, Moyer had a stroke of inspiration. She wrote herself a note: 'Put the marble in the painting.'
Moyer learned about creating captivating illusions with light and material on movie sets, where her father was a gaffer on films including 'Risky Business' and 'Groundhog Day.' But unlike a moviemaker, Moyer wanted to draw her viewers' attention to the mechanics behind the illusion, not obscure it.
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