Once and future light
Patterns and connections in 'Aerial Luminations'
By Victoria Dalkey -- Bee Art Correspondent



This is a detail of "Archipelago," a 6-by-8-foot acrylic painting on canvas by Joan Moment.


Prehistoric art and telescopic photos of outer space are among the sources that nationally known Sacramento artist Joan Moment draws on in her recent acrylic paintings at JayJay. The works look both to our ancient past and the unknowable future, tracking the mark-making impulses of early humans and the light from stars long dead by the time we see them.

The pieces in "Aerial Luminations," which were shown earlier this year at California State University, Stanislaus, are the latest of Moment's "imprinted paintings," a series that began in the mid-1990s. Inspired by cave art, the first works were canvases covered with the artist's hand prints. Then came images made by pressing leaves from the trees around her house onto canvas. The current series is an extension of works made by pressing paint-laden bottles and jars on canvas to create images ranging from cellular structures and air bubbles to constellations and star charts.

While many of the works at JayJay continue to refer to the vast reaches of outer space where stars are born and die, they also suggest a wider range of meanings both microcosmic and macrocosmic. Picking up threads from Moment's earlier "imprinted" works, they allow you to see the connections that tie works from the last decade together. Made with her fingertips, the small dots that knit together the circles in "Archipelago" are a logical extension of the hand prints Moment began using at the outset of her investigations and continue her interest in touch as a compelling force for her work. With its faint ghosts of leaves, "Spot Check" offers a bridge between the earthly biomorphic forms of her "garden paintings" and the abstract geometry of the "orb series" that led to her star-strewn canvases.

Though Moment eschews the brush in most of these new works, they are very much paintings. An attention to surface tactility and a depth of multilayered glazes impart a richness to the works. By scraping and blotting, adding touches of color and streaks suggesting the movement of comets, she activates her canvases so that they do not slip into the sterility that their conceptual underpinnings might prompt in an artist with less commitment to the act of painting.

It is the fusion of idea and physicality that lends the work its vitality. In talking about the paintings at JayJay, Moment cites as sources prehistoric cupules -- circular carved concavities found in caves and rock art sites around the world -- and photographs of outer space made by satellites and giant telescopes.

Cupules, which are pecked or ground into vertical or horizontal rock faces, have been associated with patterns that resemble constellations. Interestingly, one theory about cupules holds that they are related to "ringing rocks," unusual stones that emit a bell-like sound when tapped. In a statement accompanying the show, Moment likens herself to a percussionist, recording her rhythmic impulses through fast repetitive stampings of the mouths of jars and bottles.

Ethnographers also note the possible connection of cupules to fertility rites, in which it is thought by some that pubescent girls ground the cupules, and barren women consumed the rock dust produced. Moment's focus on deep space, where huge, cloudlike shapes act as incubators for baby stars, also connects with fertility and renewal. Evoking the immense passages of space and time in the cosmos, the constellation paintings also address ideas about evanescence, transcendence and infinity.

To convey the vastness of space with its layers of successive generations of stars coming into being and passing into nothingness, Moment builds up layers of paint -- cobalt blue to begin and then a last layer of ultramarine. On this ground, she imprints dots and circles, creating patterns of connected orbs that suggest air bubbles, nets for catching stars or, in the case of "Archipelago," islands or continents adrift in water.
In "Without End," she flecks paint, mostly white but with touches of magenta and yellow, onto the blue ground, creating an overall composition reminiscent of Jackson Pollock's paintings. Spattered instead of dripped,

Moment's stars and galaxies move farther and farther back into space, forming strings when they approach the edge of the universe.

Vibrant yellow instead of blue serves as a ground for "Cosmic Net/Orange Rain." Dealing with earthly images in a celestial context, the painting is similar to an earlier work, "Looking Through the Yellow Sea of Blue Moons," done after the death of her father. The imagery, Moment reveals, relates to crop circles seen during airplane flights to Florida to see her sick father and trips to the Southwest, where she was struck by reddish stains on the rock faces of petroglyph sites. Suggesting both tears and waterfalls, the orange "rain" streams down a surface bubbling with circular forms that cluster over pale blue and green washes that suggest pulsating organic forms. While mindful of mortality and mutability, the work is radiantly alive and joyful rather than morbid or moribund.

Yellow, too, is the ground for "Pop-Op," a playful canvas that scintillates with optical energy. The visual buzz is created by variations in the color relationships and temperatures of blue, pink and yellow polka dots dancing across the picture plane, sometimes receding, at others thrusting themselves forward. With no place for the eye to rest, the cheerfully chaotic painting is both beguiling and aggressive.

Though it seems more "arty" than her other works, it too deals with themes that have run throughout Moment's work since the mid-'90s. Using methods that combine arbitrariness and improvisation, she addresses images and ideas of forces embodied in a universe too large for us to comprehend, as well as the mortality, fragility and transience of the material world.

A series of quiet yet compelling mixed-media works by British artist Eleanor Wood share the space at JayJay. Reminiscent of the delicate minimalism of Agnes Martin, they convey a sense of richness and invention within a limited range of color, materials and composition.

Using earthy yet ethereal colors (browns, grays, reds and subtly varying shades of white), Wood creates repetitive yet dynamic abstract compositions that incorporate ruled pencil lines, pin pricks, strips of thick and thin papers, watercolor washes and waxy pigments.

Exploring the borders between illusion and reality, the works in the show move from a dry grid of tiny lines on a warm, gray-brown background to an evocative composition of ghostly rectangular shapes interrupted by a lush, painterly field of sanguine pigment.

Wood's works manage to be both austere and beautiful, fragile yet powerful, and one hopes to see more of them.

Joan Moment: Aerial Luminations; and Eleanor Wood: Shifting Borders
WHERE: JayJay, 5520 Elvas Ave.
WHEN: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, through June 24.
INFORMATION: (916) 453-2999