November 20 – January 17, 2015
Opening reception: Thursday, November 20, 6–8 pm
Artist Talk: 7 pm
Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce head., an exhibition of projection paintings by Donald Moffett. This is the artist’s first solo presentation at Lora Reynolds Gallery.
Moffett projects a video image of a head onto each large, monochromatic painting in the show. The subject is mostly still and sits in front of a dark background. The camera slowly circles the figure to present an omnidirectional impression of the subject’s head: face, neck, ears, hair. Moffett’s approach to capturing the portraits is formal and systematic.
The paint on the surfaces of the canvases—which are eight feet high by six feet wide—is white, thick, gritty, and richly textured. On top of the chalky acrylic paint is a layer of minuscule, reflective glass beads similar to those historically used to amplify light on projection screens.
head. is the fifth series of projection paintings Moffett has produced since 2002. This body of work has always been about expanding the viewer’s experience of a painting into an immersive, dynamic, time-based, content-driven one. In addition, the pieces in head. collapse the tropes of painting, video, photography, and sculpture into a single, new form of portraiture.
The projection paintings are neither just projections nor just paintings—like paintings, the physical objects hang on the wall and are covered with heavily textured acrylic paint; like videos, the image moves and changes over time; like photography, the subject sits mostly frozen, as if posing for a picture; and like sculpture, the viewer can observe each subject from all sides. Moffett’s amalgamations are physical and intimate declarations of the enduring value of the vulnerable self, even in today’s virtual world where identity increasingly exists as the sum of poorly secured data points.
Donald Moffett, born in 1955 in San Antonio, lives and works in New York. Moffett has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. He has participated in group shows at the New Museum (New York), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and many other institutions. Some institutions that have his work in their collections include the Blanton Museum of Art (Austin); Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Walker Art Center; Linda Pace Foundation (San Antonio); and David Roberts Art Foundation (London).