Series Descriptions
Star Map 1, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 80", Public Collection, American River College
From the early 2000s to the present, Moment has explored "flow painting" – a process that relies on the natural character of diluted pigment to help build a composition. For Moment, this involves pouring, dragging, dissolving and allowing thin "paint water" to clot, collect and disperse in ways that resemble natural phenomena, such as cosmic gases, ocean currents and geological formations. Overtop these turbulent grounds, Moment, using bottle tops, imprints interlocking circular forms that recall cellular structures and constellations. In the most recent of these paintings, the artist places op-ish arrays of circles on top of the multi-layered grounds, creating phantasmagorical visions of the Earth, as if viewed from deep space. Mark Van Proyen, in the catalog essay for a 2006 exhibition of these paintings at California State University, Stanislaus, said: "These configurations could be taken as idiosyncratic constellations devised by some ancient or even extraterrestrial navigator as an aid to a grand journey through a world where microscopic and macroscopic views are as one, leading us to the place where we can see how the flexibility and flux of primordial pulsation start to breed the architecture of consciousness."
Tibet II, 1998, acrylic, Kozo Japanese paper, 26” x 20”
In 1993, while living in Peter Voulkos’ compound in Oakland (“The Dome”), Moment set aside the brush and began making imprinted paintings with her hands. Aggressive and grid-oriented and rendered in primary colors at large scales, these primordial works telegraphed, in a visceral manner, the artist’s unconscious response to current events: the nightly gunplay outside her studio, the violence taking place in aftermath of the Persian Gulf War and the ongoing AIDs epidemic. In the mid-1990s, in keeping with her non-political stance, Moment adopted a quieter more introspective approach to those issues. She daubed leaves plucked from her Sacramento garden in acrylic paint and imprinted them onto paper and wood panels coated with wet spackle. The resulting Garden Fresco Series portrayed the fragility of plant structures in a way not readily visible to the naked eye, and in so doing they described, literally and metaphorically, the temporal nature of all life forms. These series were the subject of an 11-year survey at Huntington Beach Art Center in 2003. In his catalog essay for the show, Peter Frank wrote: Moment’s work “reminds us of what all religions remind us: there is a world beyond the body, and the soul can transcend. Beyond the melodrama of the splattered, runny paint and the cascade of palms, moreover each hand is a positive declaration, an “I am here” – better, “I am still alive” – impressed upon the universe.”
Wall, 1986, acrylic on rag vellum, 30” x 44”
Inspired by readings of Pablo Neruda and a trip to her hometown of Fairfield, CT., Moment, in 1988, began a series of works on vellum consisting of watery images of stacked stones, reminiscent of the crumbling walls she saw in New England as a child. They embodied the oppositional qualities transience and endurance that the artist has probed throughout her career. The series, wrote Victoria Dalkey in the Sacramento Bee, "advances explorations into the use of abstract biomorphic shapes as primordial archetypes that embody both emotional and spiritual states." A trip to Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico, in 1991, yielded a series of paintings of sunflowers on vellum that functioned similarly, as radiant symbols of fleeting beauty.
Various States of Being, 1985, acrylic, cast gesso and gauze mounted on canvas, 6’ x 7’
Moment’s paintings in this series, “offer what might be called a mytho-erotic image in their presentation of connotative elements that are at once primordial and cosmological in nature,” Mark Van Proyen wrote in Artweek. “They are in keeping with a host of cross-cultural art-history tradition which are like those represented by paleolithic ritual objects, tantric manuscripts and the stone-cut depictions of erotic entangled figures that adorn the walls of some ancient Hindu temples in India…Needless to say the use of such imagery…is nothing new. Yet Moment’s paintings demonstrate an ability to make this concern convincing, and she does so in terms that are respectful of the ideas and affects generated…” In the catalog essay that accompanied a show of this work at the Rena Bransten Gallery in December 1985, Christopher French wrote: "Moment makes her mythic fantasies visible, marking time that is neither logical nor linear. Her language is a series of romantic signs; her images are active nouns and passive verbs that are wrapped in the luminous adjectives and adverbs of her color and gesture. Hers is not only a votive spirituality, but an earthy often highly sexual energy…Her paintings grope toward an alchemy that will defeat the heavy gravity of the earth and allow for unencumbered transit through the air."
Joan Moment w/Columnic Personages II, 1984, Gray Art Gallery, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, latex enamel on canvas, 11 x 25 feet
In 1981 Moment took a sabbatical in New York, and subsequently began living bi-coastally (1981-1993), alternating teaching duties in Sacramento with visiting professorships at universities up and down the Eastern seaboard. During this period, she expanded her visual vocabulary. She incorporated classical columns, which she transformed into phallic objects and elliptical biomorphic spheres, which became stand-ins for female sex organs. "In her paintings," Jeff Kelley wrote in Artweek, “the surface texture is both primitive – that is, unrefined – and also contemporary code for painterly risks and liberties…Thus, the composition becomes an overall pattern that reflects the artist's mind, not just the intrinsic organizational properties of primitive line and holistic form. Through this subtle but major step, Moment's work achieves a rich, intuitively stacked equivalence between surface and image that reminds me of Philip Guston's work and its thick, cartoon-like sexuality. And like a cartoon jumping the storyboard, Moment's art comes to life as a primitive rhythm instead of just looking like one."
Unexplored Regions (detail), 1984, acrylic, cast gesso and gauze mounted on canvas, 6 x 7 feet
Calling on the immediacy and impact of tribal art from Africa, Australia, Asia and the Americas, Moment began applying geometric shapes to dresses, chairs and canvases. On chairs, matched to patterned wall compositions, she painted directly. Dresses she covered with gesso-treated cheesecloth and painted them with layers of latex enamel. “The artist,” wrote Roger Clisby, curator of the Crocker Art Museum, “has linked the intuitive impulses found in most contemporary abstract painting to the strong traditions of naïve art through the repetition of pattern that becomes ritualistic and spiritually liberating. She is keenly aware of how each painting demands to be painted, and allows her unconscious to play a major role in the development of images and patterns.” In a journal entry Moment wrote: “I am not interested in painterly finesse. I want to paint the image crudely and for that crudity to be authentic. I would like to make the images appear as if they had been born, emerging from mud.”
Woman in Water, 1974, acrylic, rubberized canvas, 36” x 34”
In the early 1970s Moment continued to explore the possibilities of nontraditional materials, incorporating and personalizing the symbols, signs and icons she found in native art from around the globe. Ritual, repetition, obsession, chance and randomness became permanent features, reflecting a widespread desire among Bay Area artists, of bringing elements of craft into painting. Byzantine mosaics were a particularly strong influence. The result was a series composed of multi-colored dots – mosaics in paint that depicted mountains, plants, people and fish set against quasi-pointillist black backgrounds that seemed to vibrate electrically as they evoked sensual and paradisiacal yearnings. The works earned her a spot in the 1973 Whitney Biennial alongside William Wiley, Ed Paschke, Hannah Wilke, Louise Bourgeois and others. The following year, 1974, the Whitney’s chief curator, Marcia Tucker, selected Moment for a solo exhibition, making her the second female artist from Northern California to receive that honor. Writing in the exhibition catalog, Tucker called the paintings “an immutable paradise of invented forms…forgotten Edens in which familiar flora and fauna are transformed into exotic, otherworldly creatures existing in a place devoid of time or events.”
Aluminum Condom Relief (Detail), 1971, acrylic on rubber latex, aluminum neoprene, cheesecloth condoms, 86” x 63.5”
After visiting Dinosaur National Monument in Utah (a paleontological site where thousands of bones are embedded in a cliff), attending a 1970 exhibition at the de Young Museum of early Australian Aborigine bark paintings, and reading books on erotic art from the Near East, Moment embarked on a series composed of rubber latex and neoprene rubber. Using polyethylene as a low-relief mold, she painted multiple layers of rubber latex and then added gauze and individual condoms. The stickiness of the substrate prevented the precise placement of condoms -- once affixed, they remained in place. Though these "rules" of engagement were somewhat rigid, the end product embraced of chance. It reinforced the differences between the individual objects, highlighting the vulnerability of the body and its sexual, material essence. In 1996, on the occasion of a Southern California exhibit of erotic art in which some of these same works appeared, Moment wrote: "I made the condom paintings in response to certain private fears and strong desires. At the time, "I denied all of the obvious associations to the penis and the sex act," though "by creating them, they had tremendous healing power." The works elicited responses ranging from outrage to amusement. "Like mirrors," Moment later wrote, "they reflected viewers' predilections about sex." The works were exhibited in a group show, Sacramento Sampler 1, co-organized by the Crocker Art Museum and the Oakland Museum. It traveled to four major museums in Brazil and included works by William T. Wiley, Robert Arneson, Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Roy de Forest and Stephen Kaltenbach.
Burial, 1966, Victorian suitcase, doll, blue pigmented resin, mixed media
Her first important work, Burial (1966), was an assemblage. It showed an old doll in an open suitcase surrounded by radio tubes, cookie cutters and personal ephemera. It was an attempt to simultaneously come to grips with the death of her mother, with whom she had a difficult relationship and a nursing career which she repudiated to become an artist. This she followed with other highly personal investigations using nontraditional materials. Works included rubber band potholders, rubber tapestries made of balloons and rubber latex and neoprene rubber paintings. In the latter, condoms were embedded in layers of rubber latex, neoprene rubber and cheesecloth. Exhibited widely to responses ranging from outrage to amusement, the condom "paintings", the artist says, were "like mirrors": they reflected viewers' predilections about sex, but for her, they were less a provocation than a way of working through fears using contemporary materials. During this period, the artist also created an autobiographical cartoon strip, The Adventures of Felicia Shy.