Artweek November 2006 Volume 37, Issue 9

Sara Hunsucker and Adam Moyer at Sixteen:One Gallery

At first glance, the works of Sara Hunsucker and Adam Moyer—two young artists having their first significant show in Los Angeles—appear to have little to do with each other. In her drawings and watercolors, Hunsucker often uses herself as subject, exploring themes of aggression and voyeurism to create works on paper that fuse soft-edge watercolor with rigid pencil line. Moyer deploys found imagery, cutting and collaging disparate elements into new meaning. Whether in the image or its execution, both artists offer meditations on violence.
The first works one sees in the gallery are from Hunsucker’s Dark Matter series—mixed-media works on paper that depict bodiless heads floating on a white ground. Each head is meticulously drawn in pencil, painted with watercolor and then “spoiled” by the addition of black enamel splatters. In Dark Matter #3, From the Head, as if someone had dropped a cup of chocolate syrup on the subject, the splatter moves from the head onto the negative space of the page. In Dark Matter #1, From the Mouth, the enamel emanates from the subject’s mouth and in Dark Matter #2, Exchange, two heads are at opposite ends of the paper, one spurting from his mouth, the other engulfed in a spray of residue while shedding a single enamel tear. These aggressive disembodied heads share a wall with a series of nine small works, People Looking at My Boobs. To create these images Hunsucker photographed the subjects as they reacted to her flashing her breasts and then made drawings of the photographs. Where the drawings reveal little of the social interaction, the accompanying printed notes offer documentation: Hunsucker’s relationship to her subject, how and when the photo occurred and what their reaction was. Matching the text with the images gives new insight into the parameters of the work, but the viewer remains frustrated by their lack of specificity. Hunsucker uses her subjects as a way to talk about the complexity of intimate physical and psychological relationships.
Two works, Knees and Mortal Danger (self portrait), examine the potential of violence toward women, in general, and herself, in particular. In the latter, the artist, painted in a less than flattering manner, is being hugged by a large, dark unidentifiable creature that nonchalantly, yet threateningly, gropes her breast. Similarly, in Knees a woman lifts up her skirt to reveal a bloodied and bruised knee above a tattooed foot.
In a like vein, the idea of wounding or destroying is integral to Moyer’s collages too. In these small-scale works, newspaper and magazine images are combined and juxtaposed to obvious and subtle effects. In several individual works and his Ugly Hurts series, Moyer literally explodes model rockets on the paper cutout, destroying the figure in the image—usually culled from a generic sales catalog—creating a burnt void. The relationship between the missing and what remains is detached and points out how inured to violence we have become. Alongside Moyer’s violent edge is a lot of humor. His use of record albums—cutting parts out of one and inserting it another—yields uncanny and funny mismatches. In There is No Greater Love/Christ is All he has replaced one of two singer’s heads with its counterpart’s. Moyer also likes to sand and erase media figures—Tarzan, Clint Eastwood—into hollowed out zombies.
Moyer is quite successful in making simple works where two found images are combined. In Sliding Girl, Stage Right the image of a young girl, her head cropped out, is collaged into an image of an empty stage in a scenic landscape. Similar juxtapositions occur in Yard Work (Lawn Mower) and Yard Work (Chain Saw): Bodies of children are cut apart and fused with shiny metal hardware. While Moyer clearly draws from past eras of montage, his formally and conceptually sophisticated works prove original.
Drawing from experiences in both art and life, Moyer’s and Hunsucker’s works, even if a bit raw in technique, speak to each other as well as to us about the nature of decay, violence, as well as surprise in the observable world. These are artists to watch.

--Jody Zellen


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