Karen Moss...an embarrassment to RISD? yeah, pretty much. Reaffirming why Postmodernism is the worst ever? yeah, pretty much.

Human/animal hybrids, playful suburban children traced from 1950's coloring books, panoramas of repeated black and white outlined figures, traced images over broad washes of color...I had the vague feeling that I had seen all this before, except exponentially better executed by outsider artist Henry Darger.

Painter, RISD grad and veteran artist Karen Moss' show at the Fourth Wall Gallery in Boston this weekend was unoriginal, tacky, and vaguely offensive. Moss appropriates images of graffiti, trash, homelessness and military life with the same flippancy with which she uses traced images of 50's coloring book children and animals. It is very clear that she has nothing to say about homelessness, war, street art or poverty and is using this charged imagery purely to achieve some sort of vaguely marketable aesthetic. Thank you Karen Moss. You are why people hate artists.

Moss clearly had very little to say, few aesthetic ideas and even fewer technical or visual communication skills to back those ideas up.

The centerpiece of 'Dissonant Worlds', 'The Commuter' (above), is a prime example of the flimsy,   "concepts" behind Moss' work. The blue acetate rabbit is 'the commuter', the art student ( he's carrying a palette and brush, do you get it? do you get it?) who commutes between the pastoral picnic tableau on the right hand side and the urban alleyway on the left hand side (graffitti, street art, trash, rats = baaadddd). Moss presents us with these two contrasting settings ("Dissonant Worlds" do you get it? do you get it?) this imagery, and this character...and then does nothing with it. She doesn't comment on the idea of the commuting art student, or on the dissonance between these two settings, she doesn't present the viewer with any questions about the imagery, the concept or the situation presented. As with all of her work, Moss simply presents the viewer with simplified, barely conceptualized imagery and tosses her hands and announces that she is done. None of the pieces in this show go beyond the presentation of appropriated imagery and Moss expects the viewers' associations with the presented imagery to carry the piece. Thank you, Karen Moss, for reminding me why postmodernism is the worst ever.

Could her piece 'Strangeness in the Suburbs' (above) possibly be a more poorly constructed imitation of the sweetly naive panoramic illustrations from Henry Darger's 'The Story of the Vivian Girls'?

When I first walked in the gallery opening on Friday, I took the pieces I saw with a grain of salt. I thought that the show was exhibiting the work of a an inexperienced, newly graduated undergrad painter and not that of a 67 year old veteran who received her masters from SMFA & Tufts in 1974. When will art schools start reinforcing the dangers of using appropriated imagery purely for aesthetic purposes and ignoring the meaning behind that imagery? When will artists realize that simply presenting the viewer with imagery does not make the work in any way conceptual or meaningful? When will we all take our artistic blinders off and realize that homelessness, war, poverty and other socio-political situations with oft-appropriated imagery exist and that simply using them for aesthetic purposes furthers the intellectual separation between art and the real world. Appropriating imagery of homelessness, war and poverty make it seem less real for the viewer and establish these issues simply as wells for meaningless isolated imagery. 

Although this show ranged from disappointing to mildly upsetting, the Fourth Wall Gallery is beautiful space that I look forward to seeing other shows at in the future. 

besos, 

Emily