Andrew Moore: The Spell of Time June 1 - July 7, 2024
Andrew Moore
June 1 - July 7, 2024
KMR Arts is proud to announce the opening of our exhibit, The Spell of Time, by Andrew Moore. This is Moore’s first exhibit at KMR Arts. Please join us for the opening reception and book signing with the artist, Saturday, June 1, 2024, from 2-5pm. Andrew Moore’s photographs create a narrative of a sense of place and time as it affects the natural landscape.
Andrew Moore’s exploration of the Hudson River, Catskill Mountains, and New England’s landscapes has yielded photographs of sublime mystery. These images combine seemingly disparate qualities: beauty and decay, fragility and strength, beginnings and endings. The themes of the Hudson River School painting, discovery, exploration, settlement, are as evident in Moore’s photographs as they are in the paintings of Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church.
Andrew Moore speaks about this body of work: “Here is a forest wading into a river. Here, a tangle of saplings penning a private script. Here is an artist in the act of making a landscape, a picture that feels familiar--didn't Cole paint that? Didn't Church? --just as the place itself often feels familiar. When the first American painters made pictures of the Hudson River Valley, they saw the landscape as uniquely wild, its mountains, forests and rivers a sublime symbol for the vast wilderness of the so-called New World. But of course, this world was not new, not wild, not, in the end, even that vast. And images of it went from mysterious to familiar with astonishing speed--from painting to lithograph to dinner plate to beaded belt, until the actual landscapes came to feel like folding picture postcards of themselves. And today, any Instagrammer can put herself in the picture. The Hudson River Art Trail offers images at trailheads with the tagline "Step into a landscape painting." Snap, tag, post--I was here--and then we too become one more piece of digitized data, one more ghost in the machine.”
"Nature is a haunted house," wrote Emily Dickinson, "but Art -- a house that tries to be haunted." If the photographs have a sense of unease, it's a fruitful unease, a productive haunting. What is this place? The elements themselves shift their shapes. The Hudson River is not really a river but a tidal fjord; the Catskill Mountains are not really mountains but an eroding plateau. The wilderness is not really a wilderness but a factory that fell asleep and woke up twenty years later to find itself crumbling. This place is not really a place but an event, a location unfolding in time, drunk on its own story, as we are always drunk on ours. And like the train speeding ahead in the darkness, the sheep unsure of how to proceed, we are elements in this place's story. We have no idea how it ends.”
Moore’s work is represented in numerous public collections in the United States and internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., the Israel Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Four monographs of his work have been published: Inside Havana (2002, Chronicle); Russia (2005, Chronicle); Detroit Disassembled (2010, Damiani); and Andrew Moore: Cuba (2012, Damiani).
If you would like more information, please email kathy@kmrarts.com.