Sam Moyer was born in 1983 in Chicago, IL. She Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Sam did her MFA in 2007 from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT and completed her BFA in 2005 from Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington D.C.

All of Sam Moyer’s multimedia projects have a common quality of borrowing images or materials from everyday life, and manipulating them or reproducing them into abstraction.

With a background in photography, Moyer makes works that are monochromatic, modular, and rooted in geometry, with a focus on texture, pattern, and tactility. For example, her “Worry Rug” series (2009) is made from cheaply purchased Ikea rugs that she then dyed and picked apart, while another series of drawings uses pocket-sized book covers as their basis.

Moyer has also become well known for using dyed and crumpled stretches of fabric that she mounts onto wood panels by ironing. These pieces frequently have subtle patterns created using bleach and ink.

Artworks of Sam Moyer are not photographs, or even reproductions of photographs. Nor are they printed, like the artist’s earlier experiments with Xerox facsimiles. To produce these new paintings, Moyer first dyes pieces of raw canvas in India ink, then allows the fabric to dry in wrinkles and folds. Once set, the artist stretches the canvas out, draws line and patterns (usually stripes) with bleach, and finally irons it onto the panel. This choice of material, combined with the process to which it is subjected, gives the finished paintings a soft focus and inviting tactility unachievable in photographs printed on paper.

Sam Moyer’s paintings’ potentially and even frightening enterable space can be related back to the infinite abysses of Abstract Expressionism. In this context, we might understand their deepness as more of a metaphysical depth than a physical one. Such an approach lets the artist’s process come to the fore, which, although not entirely innovative, helps give her work another form of depth, namely a conceptual one.

While certainly aesthetically impressive from the shore, it is only by diving into Moyer’s works that one can approach the profundity hidden below their surfaces.