Ragen Moss

Redling Fine Art is pleased to present Gray Mandates, a solo exhibition of new sculptural works by Ragen Moss. This will be the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.

Operating between the optic and the haptic (the visual and the tactile), Ragen Moss’s voluminous, transparent sculptural objects reflect and embody her interest in the commonplace conventions and faculties of daily life.

First carved out of foam and shaped using a vacuum form, Moss creates clear hard-shelled sculptures that act as a multilevel substrate for painting and textual elements. Moss likens the viewer’s relationship to them as similar to that of “a person wearing a sweatshirt”—confronting the viewer with both a figure as a spatial proposition, as well as a textual announcement. She elaborates: “The work should function somewhere between consumption and learning; between chewing gum and reading (where the viewer uses the same ‘tools’ they would in any other daily matter).

Moss describes the new series of hand-carved “L”-shaped sculptures within Gray Mandates as “brackets, arrows, corners, ‘L’s, depending on how they’re exhibited.” Completely modular along all axes, their mutability is core to their function. They can be stacked, nested or hung in any direction, making them building blocks.

The importance of textual elements within Moss’s overall practice is paramount. Those within Gray Mandates are culled from official U.S statutory descriptors for such conceptual and physical entities as ‘Object, ’Site,’ ‘Structure,’ ‘Museum,’ ‘Building,’ and ‘District.’ At once humorous and discomforting, they allow an investigation of the excesses that occur in attempting to move from theory to practice, and illuminate the gaps that occur when cultural or societal constructs attempt to encompass the desires of their constituents.

Ragen Moss (b. New York) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from UCLA in 2012, as well as a JD from the UCLA School of Law. Her previous solo projects include A Regular Shaped Tool at LA><ART, Los Angeles (2016); The Caring Suite, at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Los Angeles (2013); and Decent Argument Over Obscene Matter, Control Room, Los Angeles (2012). She is the editor of http://www.view-inter-view.com, an interview-based site centered on a consideration of viewership.