Ragen Moss: 8 Animals

About

These points are used to pivot around what it means to be a human operating with full spatiality.

The exhibition, 8 Animals, keeps with these ideas; and this is a way to understand how the works are made.

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Some other notes:

• Sculpture’s interiority. By using transparent materials, by overloading sculpture’s contour, and by embedding fully resolved sculptures inside each other in layers, the work asks how sculpture can be used to develop a new knowledge ofinterior space — to treat interiority not merely as a function of time or as the site where thought occurs, but instead to treat interiority as a function of the spatial. 


• Lung-like. Through the friction between transparency/opacity, illumination/darkness, sculpted-mark/painted- gesture, each work considers the extent to which it can operate as lungs — as a deployment of energies pulling in or reproducing the limits of its own surroundings. This is a spatial issue, but I also believe it is a useful way of thinking about the 8 animals in the exhibition: as lung-like.

• Couplings. The exhibition's organizing system is couplings. There are lateral couples (as we are accustom to), but there are also internal couplings. **See couples listed below.


• Handthought. The marks of the work are flat, gridded, textual, diaphanous, matte, judicial, extruded, layered, and handmade. The latter is noteworthy only because it underscores that there is growth occurring with the works because hands are also thinking and learning devices.


• Roundness put against sequence. When handwriting and other text appears within the sculptural work, the contrast between text and form is used to gather information on what it means to be a spatial figure; the suggestion with this is that good particulate can be extracted when the roundness of sculpture is put in tension with the sequentiality of language / writing.

• Figures. To construct the work, I am thinking about figures; and I continue to choose this term to reference the work because it encompasses the formalities of the figure, but also the figure’s inscription by its context, including the language, laws, and politics afforded by that context.


• Animation in sculpture. The 8 animals in the exhibit are also questioning sculpture's status as a motionless dispatcher of ideas and chasing the importance (or unimportance) of animation within sculpture.


• Space. When the exhibition is approached, it can be looked at as a continuation of an idea that I have been working on for a long time: that sculpture's categorical imperative might be to teach us about space, and why space is important.

- Ragen Moss