Sam Moyer: MGM

June 18 – August 6, 2017

JOAN is pleased to present Sam Moyer: MGM, a site-specific installation by New York-based artist Sam Moyer, produced in collaboration with the artist’s father, Mike G. Moyer.

In her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Moyer departs from her sustained practice in painting-related and architectural-inspired sculpture for a more performative and experimental collaboration. She is best known for her formal, subtly beautiful objects that combine industrial and natural materials such as rough cast-off marble, painted glass, metal, and delicate hand-dyed fabric. At JOAN, Moyer finds inspiration for MGM in the cinematic backdrop of Los Angeles and her own family history with Hollywood. The exhibition title is a reference to her father’s initials and the major Hollywood film studio, Metro Goldwyn Mayer.

Moyer lived much of her childhood in Los Angeles where her father and collaborator, Mike Moyer, spent a career as a gaffer in the electrical departments of major Hollywood productions. His credits include Risky Business (1983), The Breakfast Club (1985), Groundhog Day (1993) and The Fighter (2010) among others in a decades-long curriculum vitae. With nods to the city of Los Angeles, her father’s creative output, and JOAN’s relevance as a performance venue, the artist borrows equipment and instruments from her father’s profession. MGM utilizes cinematic lighting effects to illuminate floor-to-ceiling scrims that take advantage of JOAN’s high-vaulted ceilings and serve as a surface for projections and dynamic plays of light and shadow. Mike Moyer has rigged the lighting and designed the electrical schematic of the installation.

With the show’s opening on Father’s Day weekend,MGM is a uniquely generous invitation into the artist’s own heritage. It surfaces conversations around the legacies of creative work, parentage, and influence, while addressing the specific dynamics of father-daughter relationships.

Sam Moyer (b. 1983, Chicago; Lives in Brooklyn, NY) has exhibited her work at The Drawing Center (New York, NY), The Bass Museum (Miami, FL), University of Albany Art Museum (Albany, NY), The Public Art Fund (New York, NY), White Flag Projects and The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (St. Louis, MO), LAND (Los Angeles, CA), Tensta konsthall (Stockholm, SW), Cleopatra’s Greenpoint (Brooklyn, NY), and Société (Berlin, DE). She has also participated in “Greater New York” and “Between Spaces” at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens. Exhibitions of her work have also been shown at Galerie Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels, BE), Rachel Uffner Gallery (New York, NY), Venus over Manhattan (New York, NY), Autocenter (Berlin, GE), and Artists Space (New York, NY) among other venues. She received her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and her MFA from Yale.

All Images: Sam Moyer, MGM, Installation view