Sean Kelly is delighted to share Sam Moyer: Memory Mine, an exhibition of new work on the occasion of the artist’s solo museum debut at The Jules Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn. Moyer is known most widely for her stone paintings, combining reclaimed marble or slate with painted plaster on canvas, though she has worked across media throughout her career, including and often combining sculpture, painting, photography, and installation. A consistent and central thread in Moyer’s practice is an attunement to light – the way paint or stone absorbs or reflects it and how our perception of light shifts as one moves through space. Moyer is often if not always, incorporating the viewer into her pieces as a necessary and active component to their full realization, asking us to physically move around the work to see ourselves in relation to it.
Drawing from her interest in labor and natural material, Moyer has focused her installation at Auburn on the incredible geological vein of marble running through central Alabama. Sylacauga marble is world-renowned for its distinctive coloration and has been used in architectural landmarks across the nation as well as by artists with roots in Alabama. Moyer worked with two local quarries to obtain and cut six marble boulders, from which the stone in the exhibition was exclusively sourced, highlighting the marble as a primary subject. As Renaud Proch and Scout Hutchinson wrote in the recent monograph, Sam Moyer, published in 2023, “Throughout her practice, Moyer intuitively reconfigures the materials at hand according to their inherent qualities; their origins and histories, their traditional applications, and the memories they evoke are all integrated into the work.”
