DAMDEMICS

Malcolm Mooney and more than 25 local, national and international contemporary artists show their handmade artworks that fall somewhere between arts and crafts in this specially designed exhibit.  Artist, Veit Laurent Kurz has devised a large-scale installation to provide a setting for the works selected by curator Saim Demircan. Mooney's "Damdemic" series will be for sale in this exhibit that functions as an economy of collaboration to financially aid artistic practice.

The Celebration of the Spirit

The “Spirit” relied on observations from some of my previous paintings on paper dated from the 1960’s. There is a symbol, the pound sign (#) that appears throughout this series. This pound symbol had appeared in earlier drawings of mine from the 60’s and 70’s.  These paintings were very personal with titles that were associated with this period in my life as a resident in of Los Angeles and the vibrant palette comes from the California sun. They were exhibited in Los Angeles in 1987 at the Luckman Gallery

PAGES SERIES

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"Pages" is a series of works based on the way we read books, at least those that are in the Western world. The Pages Series began in late 1990 with the idea that markings, or marks, instead of words, would become the main emphasis of the paintings. Think of words as marks, as in "mark my words."

 “Pages” are not based on the written word but on the idea of mark making on a page becoming the vision.  These marks, Maloglyphs, represent something, not words but a visual language that moves from left to right as though reading text on a page.

VERMONT SERIES

The artists Ed Clark and Gregory Edwards inspired the "Vermont Series" with their use of push brooms and large Chinese brushes.  I decided to paint images with a color palette limited to black, white and red, using mops.  The title Red Lining is taken from the discriminatory practice in black inner-city neighborhoods. HHC1 and HHC2 are named after Hilary's Horse Comb paintings, where I used a horse comb to stamp black dots on the canvas.

Grids / Papa Fauv Series  The history of the Grids / Papa Fauv (Fine art under vision, F.A.U.V. paintings) started with 2 paintings from the late 1970’s, Blue Streak and Prelude. The Papa Fauv / Grid series uses the grid as a jumping off point to explore numerous ways for the grid to contain shapes and for the perspectives to be reimagined. The grids use overlays of shapes in front of the picture plane by introducing a shadow to give depth. Other paintings in the series use perspective to float, recede, and to give the objects in the painting a new perceived space as 2D and 3D rectangles. The Grid / Papa Fauv series continues and has led to the Celebration of the Spirit paintings.

2020-2021

This series started in the early 1960’s. It has traveled from New York to Massachusetts to Germany to California and Canada.

These works are sculptures, with found objects and discarded wood, copper tubing, rubber, and other everyday materials. The objects are based on art-historical approaches and ideas to the craft.