Of all the alternative titles for Gustave Courbet’s famous painting Un enterrement à Ornans (A Burial at Ornans), 1849–50, one might be Fern Friend Grief Growth, that of the monumental 2024 centerpiece of Sam Moyer’s exhibition at the Hill Art Foundation. If not ferns, Courbet’s image, depicting the early-autumn internment of his great uncle, included the dried fronds, grass, and wildflowers appropriate to the season. If not friends, he tucked childhood acquaintances into the crowd. If not grief, the artist rendered mourners both faithful and faux. If not growth, he created change: The pitiless maw of earth opening at the bottom of his canvas swallowed up the genre of history painting whole. Moyer’s work, if not of the same ego and extravagance as the nineteenth-century realist’s, was of similar scale, stock, and singular effect. It indexed a different kind of burial.
Part slivers of silver halide (enlarged to the size of flagstones), part Norman Zammitt “fractal” painting, Fern Friend Grief Growth—made from large chunks of salvaged marble, acrylic paint, and plaster-coated canvas mounted to MDF—expanded to a grand register. With these materials, Moyer produced a tableau of sculptural relief (occasionally approaching figuration) that rested self-consciously between mediums, even though the work was primarily referred to as a painting. Critics have lauded the equal weight the artist apportioned to both her mark-making and selection of blocks—the marble pieces floated with all the delicacy of inlaid mother-of-pearl in a violin bow, or the fastening of a dental filling. Such effortless suspension was matched by the paint Moyer flicked and tracked around the canvas—strokes in gray-green sage and dark chartreuse were drawn across its surface, contrasting with the gleaming white of her sourced slabs.
Moyer’s works are reclamations, despite the fact that the term has been somewhat banalized by the fading vogue for interior decoration featuring reclaimed barn doors and I beams. But there are deeper tones in this art: The word reclamation, from the Latin reclamatio, denotesa sharp utterance of disapproval, the calling back of something that has been taken, lost, or denatured. To reclaim something is to cry out or demand stewardship of its past. Such gestures aren’t acts of ownership for Moyer, but reenchantments of material combined with a recognition of her belated arrival to their history. Her works become twin chronologies hinged at a joint, much like the pieces in her 2021 “Dependents” series installed nearby: self-supporting sculptures in which the weight of two rock forms balanced one other. Similarly, her “Hard Message”series, 2023, tucked into a gallery adjoining Fern Friend Grief Growth, continued this study in counterpoise. Here, silver halide crystals were returned to the realm of the microscopic via black-and-white photographs of Long Island beach stones, both natural and man-made, weathered by sea churn. These prints were dressed in stone-aggregate and concrete frames, and the juxtaposition between the pictures of reclaimed rocks and their borders hinted at the harder messages—the transmutability of material, its inconsequence.
Returning to Fern Friend Grief Growth, the piece might also be called “Woman with Holes,” the title of Moyer’s exhibition itself, as well as that of a 1969 Isamu Noguchi sculpture, Woman with Holes II—another sort of reclaimed thing—which she selected from the Hill Foundation’s permanent collection for her show. Moyer drew several other works from the institution’s holdings and placed them in repose alongside her own. Often, these contiguities were compelling: a pair of Liz Glynn casts (one of a tumbleweed in stainless steel, another of an ambiguous torso in bronze), a pair of Robert Gober fixtures (a washbasin in one room and a cast-pewter drain affixed to a wall elsewhere), a scaled-up copy of a gently worn eraser painted in perfect pink verisimilitude by Vija Celmins, and canvases by Jasper Johns and Brice Marden. A third Gober work, Untitled, 2018–22—a Joseph Cornell–style shadow box holding a conch shell and kitschy paper snowflakes—stood opposite four pieces from Moyer’s “Hard Message” series. The proximity of the objects suggested other friendships, other sorrows. If Fern Friend Grief Growth was the show’s great statement, then Moyer’s more subtle works on paper, which made up a large portion of this presentation, were her most fascinating. Her paper lattice Screen for Mure-cho, 2025, was hung over a window and threw shadows over Noguchi’s sculpture like a shroud, while her “Soft Mod” series, 2024, exhumed the modernist myths of grids and windows, burying them again in the dyed pulp and fiber of her handmade paper.
