Webs Of Relation: Carrie Moyer And Sheila Pepe At The Museum Of Arts And Design
-
Loading... - Alice Barone
- 15 Apr 2022
- 313 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
“Tabernacles for Trying Times” at the Museum of Arts and Design was a drifting survey of the work of painter Carrie Moyer and sculptor Sheila Pepe, among the most high-profile queer couples in the contemporary art world. Friends since 1995, partners since 1998, and legal spouses since 2015, Moyer and Pepe are well known for their individual practices: the former for radiant paintings in which abstract forms transmute into suggestive bodily shapes, the latter for enthralling fiber-based installations that recall spider webs.
But they employ complementary formal languages and share a longstanding engagement with feminist and queer politics in their art and activism alike. The exhibition intermingled the two artists’ works, allowing viewers to pick up on the correspondences between, for instance, the navy-blue curvy lattice of Moyer’s painting Curtains (2016), set against a fiery backdrop of reds, oranges, and yellows, and the dark loops and knots of rope that comprise Pepe’s hanging work 91 BCE Redux (2020); or how the rich blue, purple, and orange fibers that compose Pepe’s droopy, amorphous weaving Just This Corner (for 2020), 2021, might be a direct response to the shapes and hues present in Moyer’s Cloud Buds (2019), which evokes a tree limply attached to nipple-like clouds.
