Carrie Moyer's Fan Dance at the Golden Nugget joined the collections in 2019, adding to the Art Center's representation of both female and Queer artists. This piece was included in the Art Center's 2019 landmark exhibition, Queer Abstraction, the first show in the Des Moines Art Center's 70-year history to focus exclusively on LGBTQ themes. Queer Abstration united both national and international contemporary artists who utilized the amorphous possibilities of abstration to convey what it means to exist on the margins.
Source: DMAC News, Jan Feb Mar Apr 2023
Can the use of glitter in painting be a subversive act? For artist Carrie Moyer, it is. When Moyer returned to painting in the early 1990s after designing propaganda for lesbian and AIDS activist organizations, she found herself in a quandary: “I was secretly afraid making abstract paintings again might [be] a bit too ‘serious’ or ‘removed’ from the real world.” By incorporating glitter into her canvases—a material that is often considered over-the-top or decorative—she discovered a way to shakeup the seriousness of abstract art, and also inject queer sensibility. In doing so, Moyer disrupts the male and hetero-centric history of abstract painting.
July 22, 2020
This work exemplifies Carrie Moyer's integrated, queer style, an amalgam of glitter and acrylic paint, and a fusion of techniques that infiltrate abstraction's hetero- and male-centric reputation. The work's title is humorous but also reflects the artist's feminist concerns: it refers to the dancers of the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas, or more broadly, the concept of "showgirls." Moyer's technique of pouring paint is a style reminiscent of Color Field painters, such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. There is also a crisp-edge quality, formed from brushwork that is applied after the canvas has been colored from the pours. Toward the center of the painting is a headpiece typically worn by showgirls; in the top right quarrant is a breast seen from the side with an extending appendage in the lower portion of the canvas. Flying toward the outer edges of the painting and straight at the viewer are strange golden nuggets. Moyer reconciles an art history that excluded women and queer sensibility and also addresses the sexualization of women for a voyeur's pleasure. This is the first work by the artist to enter the collections.
NEWS, Oct|Nov|Dec 2019
Images (1)
Audio (1)
Carrie Moyer (American, born 1960)
Fan Dance at the Golden Nugget, 2017
Run Time: 1:29
Recorded by Carrie Moyer / June 28, 2019
Hi. I’m Carrie Moyer and I have a painting in the Des Moines Art Center collection called Fan Dance at the Golden Nugget which I made in 2017. The genesis of many of works is this feeling that I want to see something that I’ve never seen before and happily this work was included in Jared Ledesma’s Queer Abstraction exhibition in which he is sort of investigating the idea that something we think is being neutral, which is abstract art, how does that get inflected by our own experience. So in my work I’m thinking about all sorts of things from the idea of what does it feel like to live in the body of a woman, how do the signifiers of sort of flashy gay culture show up, so I have passages in the painting that are encrusted with glitter, to different gestures and nods to art history movements that have been important to my work such as color field painting, which shows up in pouring and the kind of veiling of color and then these sort of cut forms that go back to someone like Henri Matisse and early 20th century modernism.
