Ann Moody, No End Of
by :
Rian Hammond
Ann Moody, No End Of, 2019, mixed media, installation dimensions variable. Photo: Ann Moody.
Facing the front windows of Argus Gallery, yelling out to Niagara Street, was a triplet of collaged patchwork cloths made by Ann Moody as part of their recent exhibition Umpteen. Each human-scaled composition is made up of vibrant scraps of fabric sampled from discarded sheets, dresses, pants, shirts—the excesses of fast fashion and remnants of the artist’s personal history. The fabrics record the artist’s play: confident and spontaneous gestural lines, patterned dots, colored blotches, and heavily worked charcoal scratches and smears, which in places evoke cryptic maps or architectural blueprints. Some of these marks reveal themselves slowly to be doilies and ropes drenched in paint and plastered to the surface; others are fragments of ribbons or sheer pockets holding small found objects.
Inside, fabric collages, flags, and tapestries are suspended through the hall-like space from zig-zagging clotheslines in a whirlwind installation titled No End Of (2019). The clothespins fastening the works to the clothesline reference a space of domestic labor, housework, cleaning, maintenance, and repair that is just as drenched with gendered expectations as the frilly, satin, floral patterned, and colorful fabrics that Moody sources for their works.
By reveling in and ritualistically digesting the discarded, the old, the last season’s, the irrelevant, the works degender and recode their constituent materials with a playful joy, urgent and necessary in the face of a material culture obsessed with endless production and drowning in waste. As the artist asks of themselves in a statement, “How can I unlearn compulsive, aimless production and reorient my practice around a new kind of making, a slow making?” The manifestations of this questioning hover in the space, wavering and distorting as you move around them.
Rian Hammond is an artist, tactical biologist, transfeminista, hormone hirstorian, and part-time conspiracy theorist.
Ann Moody, Umpteen Argus Gallery
October 11 – November 16, 2019
