December 2013

Atelier Gallery in Charleston, SC, Features Works by Kirsten Moran

Atelier Gallery in Charleston, SC, will present Evocation, featuring works by Kirsten Moran, on view from Dec. 6 - 31, 2013. A reception will be held on Dec. 6, from 6-9pm.

In this new series of paintings, Moran continues to investigate the history of girls and women from the corporeal, environmental and psychological perspectives. This exhibition explores a personal journey toward an understanding of our ancestral roots: a matrilineage that connects us all through our bodies, the land and the psyche.

Moran approaches her paintings as a life-long excavation into the feminine most often utilizing the classical ruin as a point of departure. She incorporates portraiture, architectural elements and the landscape with varying degrees of abstraction in her paintings. The paint itself becomes a subject with its undeniable materiality and lushness. Her surfaces mimic the elements of the earth.

There is a sense of our own deep and archaic history when we are in the presence of a ruin. The archetypes Moran works with in her paintings are impacted thoroughly by this element of the ancient. Archetypes operate through time. Culture shifts and evolves but they remain the same and are relatable through these developments as the centuries pass. The ruin exists similarly in both places, past and present. It provides an echo for what once was and what still exists within each of us.

The forms and shapes that Moran works in the paintings are repeated continually and re-appear within her abstractions as well as her figural works. Details of the representational pieces are blown up, magnified many times over, and permit Moran to indulge in a wide array of materials and experimentation. Her figural works do not represent a direct observable reality. Rather, they convey an emotional expression that is also evident in the non-representational abstractions.

The selected works were created using a variety of sources over a 20-month period of time. Most of these paintings were created in tandem with one another. Moran used a live model, photographs of her daughter, her own body, her own photographs of casts of sculpture in the basement of the Telfair Academy at the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, GA, and many other photographic sources.

Moran is a graduate of Savannah College of Art and Design (MFA) and Binghmaton University (BFA Painting and BA Cinema). Evocation is her second solo show this year following her thesis show Ruin at Fahm Hall Gallery in Savannah, GA. Moran has exhibited at the Columbia Museum of Art, LaGrange Art Museum, Strohl Art Center in Chautauqua, New York and Pinnacle Gallery in Savannah, GA, among other venues.

For further information check our SC Commercial Gallery listings, call the gallery at 843/722-5668 or visit (www.theateliergalleries.com).

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