What Is a Deprivation? is an exhibition by Ragen Moss consisting of twelve sculptures, each suspended from a single point in the ceiling and derived by thinking about key questions for our times. Moss has been working alone on these sculptures for the past few years and continues to make each of her translucent works with her own singular hands using a method that requires both high precision and intense physical labor.
Six new creations – that are introduced here for the first time – involve the artist’s bold decision to use real fire, combustion and energy as a new sculptural medium, sculpting firelight itself into swirling licks of spiraling heat and warmth.
Moss calls this first group of fire sculptures “Lumens”, which evokes her long-standing investment in luminosity and her consistent commitment to describing sculpture’s center. Linguistically, a “lumen” is both a scientific measure of luminous flux as well as the central cavity of a hollow organic structure.
Alongside Moss’s more recognizable transparent forms with painterly marks that pull from a wide range of sources, the artist investigates a foundational concept of our time pulled from legal scholarship but extending beyond it, asking in the work: What is a deprivation? In the contemporary context, what does deprivation look like? How do we continue to recognize a deprivation (of rights, of liveliness) in our lives today?
The new Lumens lend a quality of core intensity and spirithood to such questions, and surround a viewer with real heat sculpting fire in real time in the exhibition space. As the artworks consume oxygen – which is an elemental force of life and existence – they consider the body politic in connection with notions of energy, lifelessness, mark-making as meaning-making, and what it is to be alive in today’s world. These are questions the artist has returned to time and again in her work.
