Laura Moriarty: Resurfacing

January 14 - March 7, 2021
Laura Moriarty, Skyscraper, Pigmented beeswax, powdered charcoal
Laura Moriarty, Skyscraper, Pigmented beeswax, powdered charcoal
Laura Moriarty, Jade Tableau (detail), Pigmented beeswax, black sand, powdered charcoal, and metallic pigment
Laura Moriarty, Jade Tableau (detail), Pigmented beeswax, black sand, powdered charcoal, and metallic pigment
Laura Moriarty, Ex Uno Plures 2, Encaustic monotype
Laura Moriarty, Ex Uno Plures 2, Encaustic monotype

Miss the opening reception? Watch it below!

Laura Moriarty makes process-driven works with pigmented beeswax whose forms, colors, textures and patterns result from processes similar to those that shape and reshape the earth: heating and cooling, erosion, subduction, friction, enfolding, weathering, slippage.

Taking poetic license with geology, I compare processes of the studio with processes of the earth. Layers of color form the strata of a methodology in which the immediacy of the hand can translate a sense of deep time.

Working and reworking molten, richly pigmented beeswax, I build each painting/object through a slow, simple yet strenuous physical engagement, which often becomes a metaphor for the ephemerality of life and civilization.

-Laura Moriarty

This exhibition features Moriarty’s pigmented beeswax sculptural paintings as well as encaustic monotypes. The encaustic monotypes featured are an ongoing project of Moriarty’s studio work in which she uses a heated metal plate to erode and shape sculptural paintings, and carefully off-set the trails and spillways left behind onto paper as another way of capturing time. Like thin sections in optical mineralogy, they are the thinnest possible slivers of Moriarty’s work.

View our special event in conjunction with this exhibition:

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Programs are made possible in part by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts; Hyde and Watson Foundation; The Large Foundation; and The Holt Foundation, along with other corporations, foundations, and individuals. 

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