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  C O N S P I R E

  “When people encounter my sculptures,” says Ragen Moss, “frequently the first question I get asked is: ‘How did you make this?’” More than with almost any other artistic medium, sculptures are commonly thought to be reducible to lists of technical details of their fabrication, or the affordances and symbolisms of their raw materials. This is learned behavior. At least since the heyday of Minimalism, Western artists and critics have tried to disabuse their audiences of the idea that abstract sculptures might hold any meaning beyond their own shape and fabrication. Though the work may formally resonate with a Minimalist tradition,…

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  What Is a Deprivation?

  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…

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  Humane Imagination

  Moss’s sculptures are not passive, but active; not static, but in motion; not fractional, but whole. They do not hang heavily, but seem to float up, buoyed with light and air. They are responsive: they turn, gently, in the currents generated by the movement of the viewer. They are not dead, but very much alive. They are best described not as bodies, but – as the artist has often insisted – as figures. She explains that the terms “figure,” or “figuring,” have more assertive, relational and subjective associations than the passive or corporeal “body.” Moss’s sculptures, each one autonomous and independent…

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  Horizon Figures

  There are two actions that drive the works: (1) the action of carving something away until it is completely hollowed, and (2) the action of making structure out of translucency. These are two distinct actions – to make sculpture arise from hollowness and, separately, to derive sculpture from translucency. Keeping in mind these two features – hollowness and translucency – provides a succinct way to think about each work, especially in the solid and opaque context of sculpture’s history. ***Additional notes: • Contour. The decision to make sculpture without a center – without bulk, without solid mass, without allowing a…

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  2 Assurances

  Ragen Moss is an artist whose practice considers the history of sculpture and offers the discourse of sculpture a new turn towards an original and complex use of space. Moss’s proposition for contemporary sculpture is to move away from a flat consideration of exterior rind or mere surface and instead to press sculpture towards capaciousness: a lived and expansive spatial form. Suspended from the ceiling and made from transparent and opaque materials, Moss’s works ask the viewer to fully circumnavigate them, considering the works at all angles and with a full range of motion: the space within the installation, the…

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  The Whitney Biennial

  Spatial Language: A Conversation with Ragen Moss published in Sculpture Magazine by Jan Garden Castro Ragen Moss’s breakout success at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and her current solo show point to new directions in sculpture. Spatial and temporal foci, interiority, and embedded paradoxes and ironies push her investigations into the workings of relational, mental, and physical inner spaces. Her multi-layered sculptures draw on and intermix philosophy, poetry, politics, painting, art history, and contemporary culture. Instead of offering a statement, her works form puzzles and conundrums that hide inside seductive surfaces. Jan Garden Castro: You’ve said that you want to “reinvigorate the…