Nate Moore, Skyward, 2010, origami and wood boxes, 11 x 13 feet. Photo courtesy Emily Amy Gallery.
The most visually dramatic element of Nate Moore’s current exhibition, Skyward, on display at Emily Amy Gallery is the sheer number of hand folded origami jet planes that dance across the gallery walls, coating the room in whimsical shapes and colors. Over 1000 jets, meticulously crafted over a two-year period, cover the walls of the gallery to establish the jet as Moore’s iconic image, creating an effect that is both nostalgic and meditative.
Moore has been creating origami jets for years, following his sister’s early instructions in childhood. The family connection to these jets and Moore’s continued use of the form throughout his artistic career render the jet an iconic symbol that holds a sense of nostalgia for the artist. The man-hours invested in folding each jet, and the assortment of papers that Moore has collected to create them show years worth of interest and dedication to this practice. The arrangement of jets across the gallery functions almost as documentation of Moore’s artistic and personal history in outlining possibilities of where Moore may have been at different points in his life: The viewer can imagine where Moore may have been when he accumulated the different materials and sat down to fold them. In this way, one can’t help but feel a sense of nostalgia when confronted with the visual representation of hours of meticulous, yet repetitive labor. Perhaps most of us have attempted to fold something similar in our lives. Hence, a large component of the success of this exhibition is the simultaneous universality of the exhibition as a kind of cultural memory, but also, more specifically, the obvious personal significance of the work to Moore himself.
Like On Kawara’s Today Series, each jet reflects a unit of time required to complete it. Just as each of Kawara’s painted dates correspond to a specific place and time, each jet represents a unit of time spent scrupulously shaping and folding. Like Kawara’s paintings, it is simultaneously apparent that each piece is painstakingly handcrafted, as each jet is folded exactly with near machinelike precision and consistency. The hand folding of every jet seems as important an aspect of Moore’s process as both the actual time spent folding, and the materials used to create the jets. The exhibition is as much a testament to the final product of the show as it is to the act of producing the exhibit.
Nate Moore, Armée de l'Air, 2010, framed origami, 28 x 40 inches. Photo courtesy Emily Amy Gallery.
The dense arrangement of planes in the works are magnified by their accompanying titles. Militaristic connotations of Armada and Convoy, for example, evoke an extended sense of surrounding infiltration. The orderly formations Moore creates with sets of eight and 21 jets add to this illusion. The far wall of the gallery holds the four largest compositions placed side by side. The effect of the display recalls imagery of soldiers standing in rank and file, perfectly assembled in space and construction. Moore writes in his statement, “Although the jets make sense en masse, each as an individual has a single and unique identity represented by its pattern and color. However, the jet’s shape, rather than its individual design, brings uniformity and camaraderie to each formation.”
Moore plays with the uniformity of these arrangements by using a variety of colors and patterns. The sources for his materials are diverse, coming from magazines, science books, and how to manuals. The compositions offer a range of subjects on the printed paper; some assemblages share a consistent theme, such as clocks or early modern city maps, while others pull together a number of unrelated colors and graphics. Behind each composition is a grid sketched on the wall, laid out to aid arrangement. That the grid is left behind provides an interesting effect: Not only does it contribute to the sense of ostensible craft and process involved in setting up the exhibit, but much like the minimalist conceptual installations of Sol LeWitt or Hanne Darboven, the grid creates a meditative space that appears to undulate as you focus on the play of colors across each wall. In this way, the grid creates a dynamic illusion of motion as each of the jets seems to lift off from its latticed platform.
Despite the similarity in formation and shape of the jets, Moore maintains a sense of movement through the arrangements of colored papers in the compositions. The simple figures of the jets also appear dynamic because of the way they are oriented. Each appears to be flying in formation with its companions both within the composition, and in the entire exhibit as a whole. Moore’s most dynamic composition is the entrance installation, Skyward, where streams of jets move towards the ceiling in neat lines out of boxes of jets on the floor. The composition Armée de l’Air continues Skyward’s sense of activity as a fleet of hot pink jets fly out from a larger sized, patterned jet, which sits in the bottom left corner of the room.
Nate Moore, Wood Jets, 2010, acrylic on wood, 15 x 14 inches each. Photo courtesy Emily Amy Gallery.
The number and repetition of jets surrounding the gallery in their identical pattern and gridded orientations are elevated to the level of icon in Moore’s installation, Wood Jets. For these sculptures, Moore refabricates the jet-form in a strikingly different material: wood. By reworking the jet in this new material, Moore reinforces the significance of the form of the jet as well as the process of creating it. The wood forms do not simply reflect the outline of the jet shape; rather, Moore maintains the integrity of the paper folds by layering multiple pieces of wood on top of one another. The varied stains and paints on the layers of the wooden jets, still arranged in a clean grid composition, allow the new material to work seamlessly in line with the rest of the exhibition. Because the origami jet is a figure that Moore has used over several years, the image of the jet holds specific significance to his artistic history. The jet has evolved into a kind of metonymic symbol of Moore’s identity as an artist.
Moore’s almost obsessive dedication to the folding of these jets has culminated in a successful exhibition that speaks to his exploration and development of the seemingly simplistic origami form.
Nate Moore’s Skyword continues at Emily Amy Gallery through January 29.
