Donald Moffett

PRESS RELEASE

Donald Moffett

17 September – 19 October 2004

Opening reception: Friday, 17 September, 6 to 8 pm

Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by New York artist Donald Moffett. Exhibiting at the gallery for the second time, Moffett continues to explore the boundaries of painting, sculpture and video with his ‘light loop’ projections.

Fundamentally, Moffett’s works are delicate and intensely controlled oil paintings. The heavily textured surfaces, layers of umber and aluminum paint that create sculptural knots, ropes and lattice across the canvas, are themselves visually rich, intelligent and beautiful.  The pieces expose a new and unique vantage point from which to view painting.

Add to these paintings video projections known as ‘light loops,’ images from a DVD projected onto the canvas that, in effect, light the canvas, and the result is a mix of densely painted surface and thought-provoking, deeply existential imagery.

This exhibition features Moffett’s most abstract and conceptual ‘light loops’ to date. Moving away from figurative imagery – past bodies of work have focused on The Rambles in Central Park and the city of Washington D.C. – Moffett is now studying questions of evolution, metamorphosis, and transformation.

Each of the six projections in the show begins with an image of a white canvas. The loop progresses to a hole being cut out of the center of each canvas; a hand holding a paint brush then reaches through from behind the picture plane. The brush re-paints each canvas with shades ranging from black to chartreuse to red. The application of the paint in each video is different, some paintings form from left to right, others from right to left, one piece is sectioned off into four quadrants, painted separately and in no particular order.  Once the surface has been completely over-painted, the process reverses itself, so that at the end of each loop the painting is returned to its original state of white.

Moffett adeptly takes a conceptual platform of a painting re-painting itself, re-inventing itself, and creates a commentary that can be morphed to reflect many aspects of the human experience.