Carrie Moyer and Re-Claiming History
Carrie Moyer, born in 1960s Detroit, is a Brooklyn-based artist and writer. Most recently, Moyer was chosen to participate in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Her work is described by the DC Moore Gallery, which represents Moyer, as “sumptuous paintings on canvas [that] explore and extend the legacy of American Abstraction while paying homage to many of its seminal female figures.”
Carrie’s work challenges the dominant historical script — one that erases the contributions, experiences, and narratives of women and queers. By making and creating space around these realities, indeed by devoting whole artistic pieces to them, Moyer’s paintings provide queer women “with the pleasure of seeing their own images in professional, well-designed public art,” (Q/DCA 96). While talking about her own experience with radical lesbian activism in “Do You Love the Dyke in Your Face? Lesbian Street Representation,” Moyer discussed their early approaches to activism as “a foreseeable product of gay and lesbian activism of the time: trying to get straight culture to accept us, to ‘like’ us, by becoming more visible to them, by being out.” (Q/DCA 96). This strategy, however, was not rooted in liberation but instead a reliance on assimilation and respectability politics. As obvious in her art, Carrie Moyer and other queer artist-activists decided on an anti-assimilation route.
In her 2016 exhibition at the DC Moore Gallery Sirens, Moyer integrates “Color Field, Pop Art and 1970s Feminist art” as a means of re-claiming queer/female history. Her paintings use bold, primary colors and texture in taboo ways, rejecting expected approaches in favor of a “erotics of craft,” that pushes boundaries and enables her to embody the unrestrained, perhaps chaotic, feminine power of Sirens — “each ready to sing their pleasure in streams of unfettered color.”
“My paintings may have become less explicit, but my ambition to seduce viewers into reflecting on their own conditions — optical, physical, historical and otherwise — remains undiminished. Painting is a very intimate delivery system.” *Carrie Moyer
Carrie’s paintings reflect her radical views about the nature of art, politics, and feminism; her activism as described in Q/DCA inevitably serves as a foundation for her creative work. What began as street art, public ad campaigns, and zine creation to “create facsimiles of the very images that ignored our existence,” (96) has now informed the way Moyer approaches the “fine art” of painting. However, the same vision still guides her work: disrupt normalcy, assumption with the thick, bright, glittering globs of queer affect.
