Hail Comrade!
December 5th, 2002 through January 11th, 2003
Opening reception: Saturday, December 7th, 6 to 8 p.m.
click for larger images
Debs & Co. is pleased to present Hail Comrade!, an exhibition of new paintings by Carrie Moyer. This will be Ms. Moyer's second solo exhibition with the gallery.
In May of 1968, more than 10 million Parisian workers and students went on strike against the conservative de Gaulle government in an unprecedented upheaval. Students, workers, and artists formed the Atelier Populaire, which produced a new kind of radical propaganda to encourage and inform the strikers. Ms. Moyer has taken images from this uprising as a formal point of departure for her equally radical paintings.
In this new body of work, graphics of the Atelier meet those of contemporaneous progressive movements, and collide in turn with the history of painting. In a careful juxtaposition, the artist maps and pours her way through social change and the innovations of the application of paint to canvas. Both oddly archeological and timely, the paintings are a call to arms "against the rising tide of conformity."
In Believe in Ruins, Ms. Moyer quotes directly from a graffitoed slogan of the '68 riots, filling a Wedgwood-blue field with a castellated black power fist, the lesbian symbol of conjoined female signs, and the word "capital" being smashed in a pool of beautifully poured blood-red acrylic. This elegant 18th century color schema is repeated throughout the body of work, as Ms. Moyer taps eras crucial to the history and defeat of modernisms. These gorgeous paintings are a controlled explosion, monuments to the battles of idealism and clarity.
Ms. Moyer had a solo exhibition early this year at the Gallery @ Green Street in Boston. Recent exhibitions included Unjustified at Apex Art, the 2001 Biennial Exhibition of the Ewing Gallery at the University of Tennessee, Queer Commodity at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Stand up Dick and Jane at the Project Arts Center in Dublin, Beyond the Center at Bard College, and Free Coke at Greene Naftali. Her collaboration (with Sue Schaffner), Dyke Action Machine, is currently touring a 10-year anniversary retrospective, originating at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Ms. Moyer's paintings will be presented at Arco 2003 in Madrid this winter.
IN THE PROJECT ROOM:
Emily Jacir
New Photographs: Bethlehem and Ramallah, April 2002
Emily Jacir is a conceptual artist who works in both Palestine and the U.S. While preparing for a show this spring to be held in Jerusalem, she was subject to the siege, occupation, and curfews in Bethlehem and Ramallah -- as she has been again, as of last week. The small photographs -- part snapshot, part documentation -- were taken with a digital camera, and made into C-prints. Mindful of the failure of the idea of an ecology of images, these simple photographs record quiet moments before and after violence in Palestine.
Ms. Jacir has recently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, in Unjustified at Apex Art in New York, in Social Sectors at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, in Empire/State at the CUNY Graduate Center, in Queens International at the Queens Museum of Art, in Uncommon Threads at the Herbert Johnson Museum at Cornell University, and in Greater New York at the PS1 Contemporary Art Center. She was in the National Studio Program at PS1 from 2000 to 2001, the World View's Artist in Residence program from 1999 to 2000, and the Whitney Independent Study Program from 1998 to 1999. She received a Marfa Public Arts Project grant in 2001. Debs and Co. will produce a solo exhibition of Ms. Jacir's new work from Palestine in April, 2003.