Carrie Moyer
The Stone Age, Jan 7 – Feb 11, 2007

“The Stone Age”, an exhibition of eleven new paintings by Carrie Moyer, will be on view at CANADA from January 7 through February 11, 2007. Moyer’s paintings combine the gestures of Late Modernist abstraction with the political iconography of 20th century radical graphics. “The Stone Age” has significantly expanded Moyer's visual lexicon to include allusions to figures and a deepened sense of painterly call and response with puddles and flows of suggestive color.

Moyer's new paintings are also partly inspired by the current critical reassessment of the Feminist Art Movement of the 1970s. Recalling her own first eye-opening encounter with feminist work as a young artist, Moyer creates paintings full of forms that resonate with the strangeness and preliterate opaqueness of archaic sculpture. Invented avatars — reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf, ceremonial instruments, human beings and animals — are evoked through the interplay of abstract shapes, flows of pure color, glitter and transparent veils of poured acrylic. Moyer’s paintings create a fabulously gruesome tableau of the raw toughness of radical feminism and it’s iconography.

Moyer’s tongue-in-cheek investigations of Herstory and Judy Chicago’s "central core" imagery are playfully tweaked in large paintings that place her abstracted fertility symbols within flat, poster-like landscapes worthy of a 1960’s Supergraphic. Moyer’s paintings are as refined and elegant as a Kenneth Noland bull’s-eye painting and as coarse and bold as a primal scream.

Moyer, along with her partner, Sheila Pepe, was the subject of “Two Women”, a large two-person survey and the final exhibition held at the Palm Beach ICA in 2004. Moyer was also one half of the renowned public art collaboration, “Dyke Action Machine!”, from 1991-2004.

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