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Day Jobs
Citations for sculpture texts: As a general matter we conclude that a State’s failure to protect an individual against private violence simply does not constitute a violation of the Due Process Clause. – J. Rehnquist Faced with the choice, I would adopt a “sympathetic” reading, one which comports with dictates of fundamental justice and recognizes […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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. […]
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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 […]
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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: […]
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8 Animals
Two on-going pivot points continue to be centered in the work: asking sculpture to take up the question of interior space and asking sculpture to productively press the linearity of language against the roundness of form. These points are used to pivot around what it means to be a human operating with full spatiality. 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 […]
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Spine
Questions of opacity and transparency take shape in Moss’s series of recent sculptures…. The torso-like forms bear swaths of paint and written passages culled from US laws regarding rioting. In Consumptive Reader, 1st degree (with Lemon), 2017, a painted tartan pattern is interrupted on one side by the shape of two breasts and, on the other, […]
