In “Grey,” Alison Moffett expands the study of architecture and space that begins in her precise graphite drawings. Her subtle intrusions into the third dimension—through a collaged second layer in her large-scale works in pencil on paper—now exist alongside translations of her precisely and delicately rendered structures into objects with considerable volume and mass and compose her first exhibited group of sculptures, which have been realized in collaboration with Chris Cornish. Nonetheless, Moffett’s drawing practice remains at the core of the work. The show opens with Quarantine, 2008, and Quarantine II, 2008, two drawings of nearly life-size architectural visions. Twisted and torqued as if caught in a tornado, the structure depicted in Quarantine captures the weighty forms of modernist architecture made flimsy by sheet metal and clapboard siding. An empty parking lot and an abandoned strip mall form the background to the shacks portrayed in Quarantine II. In the next room, a sculpture features two wrinkled sheets of chicken wire inside a Perspex box. Painted white and clearly visible above a black acrylic-sheet floor, the work explodes into three dimensions the space of Moffett’s expansive drawings while maintaining attention to material and design.
In each drawing from the series, “Sites,” 2009, a ramshackle structure either encloses or adjoins a smaller white cube. Meanwhile, the white plaster cubes in Cube 001, 2009, and Cube 002, 2009, are embellished with geometric fractures and irregular appendages, as if slowly disintegrating or perhaps gradually binding into cubic form. Moving between drawing and sculpture, between the actual and imagined, Moffett investigates the codependency of opposites. The three rings of copper-plated pipe on a bronze mirror in C 36, 2009, are proof that Moffett’s language is succinct: She transposes the real into illusion and illusion into the real.
