Behind your eyes:
Sarah Alice Moran &Corinna Ray
Curated by Rachel Frank
Opening Reception: Thurs, April 25, 6-8 pm
Dates: April 25 – June 8, 2019
Hours: Thurs-Sat, 12-6 pm
Field Projects is pleased to present Behind your eyes, a two-person show of works by Sarah Alice Moran and Corinna Ray, curated by Rachel Frank. With practices that blend both drawing and sculpture seamlessly, the two artists reveal and transform inner emotive spaces through their respective materials of ceramic sculpture and intricate carpet-cutting and shaping. Behind your eyes encompasses an internal psychological space, a vulnerable hidden place, and a space of both memory and of desire.
Constructed during a recent residency at Anderson Ranch Art Center, the ceramic sculptures by Sarah Alice Moran form an intimate double portrait of her and her partner, acting as vessels or containers holding inner, hidden worlds. Small details like fingernails, wrinkles, and hair are rendered with both care and a sense of longing. Behind each reposed portrait, a colorful series of ceramic shapes with glazed surfaces implies an interior emotive space hidden away from the familiar public view of the body. Lying side by side, the viewer is invited to walk around and in between these figures: the effect is evocative of both entering into a private bedroom space, rich in the specifics of memory and age, and the formalized nature of ancient and classical memorials.
Corinna Ray’s works initially encourage a Proustian tactile moment, a memory of the luxurious carpeting that served as a status symbol of wealth and comfort for typical American homes. But this suburban beige doubles as a reference and evocation of ancient and classical sandstone relief carvings, which once adorned architectural spaces served as symbols of status and luxury in their own time. Borrowing from classical or medieval painting imagery, Ray finds female images of intimacy and effectively queers them, creating subversively imagined fantasies within historical imagery. To make these carpets she scissors, forks, and combs the mock sandstone, shaping and caressing the queered figures into being from the thick pile plush carpet.
