Sam Moyer’s Marble “Paintings” Confront the Mysteries of Nature

Crafting and installing this striking, powerful, and mystifying creation has enabled artist Sam Moyer to turn the museum into an extension of her home studio, keeping a wide array of materials and procedures in play. Her show, which opened on June 30 and runs through September 29, is titled “Sam Moyer: Ferns Teeth” and addresses nature at its most lyrical, anxiety-producing, and assertive.

The exhibition reaches out to encompass the architecture of the museum, the light, the air, its surroundings, and the presence of its visitors. All are elements in this multimedia, multidimensional, and multidirected artist’s conception, as is the landscape—specifically, that of the North Shore of Long Island, where Moyer has spent many summers.

“I want everything,” she says of her work and its ingredients, and that includes the dynamic art of her husband, Eddie Martinez—whose paintings are situated in the galleries on the opposite side of the museum from Moyer’s—and games, such as the hand-carved backgammon boards made of tinted concrete with marble inlay set out on artist-made wood tables and benches in the museum’s lobby. There’s a lot to think about here. 

To begin with, the 41-year-old artist, who was born in Chicago, moved to L.A. when she was five and then to Massachusetts when she was 15 and to New York at 24, is something of a hybrid herself. She started out as a compulsive photographer, shooting film when she was 12 years old and then going on to attend the Corcoran School of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., where she studied photojournalism before switching to fine art, and then finally earning an MFA in sculpture from Yale University.

Moyer’s “everything” is hinted at in her description of the complicated process that goes into her compositions, beginning with Fern Friend Grief Growth, which required 275 pieces of stone. “I lay them out on the floor,” says the artist. “I work on the compositions. This one had 15 or 20 versions. I photograph it, reassess, readjust, go back into it, and then I have to commit when it feels right. Then the fabricator cuts all the shapes out of wood and then we cover all the wood in canvas and then we cover the canvas in plaster and then we sand the plaster and we paint it and then we have to assemble it all. There’s a lot of engineering and math. And I never really get to see it until it’s up on the wall. It’s never really the same. The dimensions really change on the floor.” All the pieces speak for themselves, appearing in their natural uncut shapes.  

Adding to the complexity is the light, which Moyer controls by adjusting the large skylights throughout the day. None of this is really surprising, given that Moyer’s father was a noted gaffer in Hollywood, a factor that she acknowledges has contributed to the cinematic quality of her art. Moyer orchestrates it all as if she were a director. Past and present, mood and memory, history and the future all interact in her presentations. The land, the built environment, and the surrounding art are her stage and props. 

In the center of the second room sits a huge sculpture, Bluestone Dependent 4 (2021), consisting of two pieces leaning against each other as if in an embrace—one a tweed-like white form composed of concrete embedded with stone aggregate, shells, and other fragments of beach matter, and the other a black Belgian bluestone chunk. Moyer says she sees this work as testimony to “co-dependence”—the two elements are perfectly balanced but not attached to each other.

Surrounding the sculpture are four silver-gelatin prints that, like the stone paintings, are more than they initially appear to be. The photos are set in artist-made aggregate concrete frames embedded with stones collected from the beach at Orient Point, on the East End of Long Island, which is also the location of the eroded sea walls depicted in Moyer’s images. These photos have the effect of trompe l’oeil paintings; stone-like shapes filled with natural and industrial materials seem to jump out at the viewer. We sense the weight and energy in the pieces of brick nestled in the detritus left over from a factory that was washed away over time.  The formations merge to unite nature and industry, Moyer says. “It represents a manmade invasion into nature.” The artist’s four-and-a-half-year-old son, Arthur, who joined us in the gallery, recalled how he named the series of prints “Hard Messages,” explaining, “I hate hard messages.” 

In the final room, we encounter one of the leading actors in Moyer’s work, the fern itself. It stars in a series of small stone-paintings devoted to its growth and development. Relationships are spontaneous. Even the triangular points of the backgammon sets echo the points of the ferns and of the teeth, suggesting connection and vulnerability.

Moyer speaks of finding incidental inspiration for these in a Robert Browning poem she happened on, titled “By the Fire-Side.” It was, she recalls, “in a passage where it’s sort of talking about ferns clinging to these wet stones and falling off, but with their leggy leaves, they manage to hold on. They represent hope and growth and life.” She says, “I’ve always been interested in that idea of ferns clinging for dear hope and life and pushing through this stone wall—their willingness to cling for their life.” 

The well-crafted words in Browning’s subtle, moving depictions are echoed in Moyer’s images themselves, as in this passage:

Does it feed the little lake below? 
That speck of white just on its marge
Is Pella; see, in the evening-glow,
How sharp the silver spear-heads charge
When Alp meets heaven in snow!

On our other side is the straight-up rock;
And a path is kept 'twixt the gorge and it
By boulder-stones where lichens mock
The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit
Their teeth to the polished block.”

The series consists of 10 stone paintings collectively titled “Clippings.” The sensitive images evoke strings of snaking ferns that act to document a plant’s new growth and maturation. But, as in all of Moyer’s works, these trigger many other associations, such as spearheads, the spinal cord, and those teeth. Real nature intrudes on art here, with the spaces between the stones allowing light both to emerge and penetrate and to hint at the potential for transience and shape-shifting. And art itself intervenes in areas of gestural painted abstraction in the background.

Moyer gives her materials considerable leeway to speak for themselves. As she told Ross Simonini in an interview for a recent monograph on her work, she doesn’t do any modeling for her stone pieces. For the large works, she tries to move all the stones herself on dollies or, working with only one assistant, stands on a ladder and directs people to move pieces as images occur to her, “like a conductor.” 

In this way, she explains, “I let materials emphasize their own character,” waiting until they look right. She photographs them at each point, intuitively stopping, not knowing how a work will turn out.  

Moyer draws abstraction in all its suggestiveness and ambiguity from the objects around her, not least from the wide range of literature she consumes, ranging from Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog, a favorite of hers, to the theater of Jean Genet and Arthur Miller. She focuses on the feelings and emotions they convey rather than on their explicit content. It’s the look of ideas, memories, stories, and emotions that she seeks to achieve.

Piece by piece, Moyer explores landscape and tries to fix her place in it. Her work plays in counterpoint with her husband’s, interacting with the weight of his painted forms, his energy, and his constant free-associating. 

Last year at the Parrish, when her work was paired with Lynda Benglis’s, Moyer revealed, she says, how “Benglis’s work is at the root of two essential components that run throughout my own practice: it introduced me to a landscape that has literally infused my work, and it provided me with a visual guide to cultivating my own collaborative relationship with material”—and, clearly, with other artists’ work, as well.

At the end of my tour, tackling these three recent chapters in Moyer’s career, I witnessed a lot of excitement by the exit to the museum. A truck arriving from Virginia pulled up with two huge blocks of marble destined to be installed in the opening gallery, representing the final ingredient in this grand studio visit. 

The two enormous puzzle pieces were to remain in their rough, raw state, never to be joined, but designed to sit side by side as examples of remarkable strength and eloquence. Rushing to greet their much-anticipated arrival were Moyer’s husband, Eddie, her studio assistant, Mary Provenzano, and Moyer’s son, Arthur, who came flying into his mother’s arms with an exuberant embrace and an eagerness to reveal how much he loved the works and how he had contributed to the show by applying masking tape to hold pieces in place, as well as by suggesting titles. And he was right about the messages. They are hard and strong.