“I was in my house, but it wasn’t my house.” For anyone who’s ever tried to explain their dream—or had to suffer the recounting of someone else’s—this is a familiar contradiction. “It was, but it wasn’t” seems to be the best way we’ve found to describe the simultaneously strange and ordinary worlds our subconscious builds. Separated from “real” life, the sleeping mind generates its own images, where the rules of space and time relax. We can slip easily from a nondescript office to our second-grade classroom, except that the door leads outside to a field we’ve never seen. Shifts in scene and character occur seamlessly, and we accept them unfazed; in dreams, unburdened by rational thought, the illogical tends to make perfect sense.
This incongruity is at the heart of Sam Moyer’s work. Stone becomes weightless, windows function more like walls, and canvas parades as marble slab. The laws of physics don’t seem to apply. Ranging from early dyed paintings to recent handmade paper works, the objects in Woman with Holes reveal the artist’s engagement with abstraction as a kind of dream logic—snippets from life partially resurfacing, recognizable forms encountered in a strange context. The works offer a sliver of something recognizable, and we’re left to complete the picture.
At the Hill Art Foundation, Moyer has put her work into conversation with objects from the Hill collection that similarly exist on the outer edges of reason. The artists she has selected use illusionism, replication, or unexpected materials to present commonplace forms in the guise of abstraction and uncanny realism. Sometimes absurd, but always grounded in the familiar, their works are haunted by everyday life: a sink drain stuck in the wall, an inexplicably oversized rubber eraser, a window that offers no view. As in dreams, real things find their shadows here.
The show is organized as a series of vignettes, discrete groupings that seem to have been cobbled together by an unconscious mind. In one alcove sits a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, a wavy little figure carved from pink and white marble. Titled Woman With Holes II (1969), the sculpture’s smooth surface is interrupted by a peppering of small divots. She might be cheekily dimpled or punctured, slowly deflating. The figure sits mute, as the light outside the picture window builds and fades over the course of the day, filtered by Moyer’s Screen for Mure-cho (2025). Made from handmade paper pulp, the latticework construction casts a gridded shadow pattern around the room, rippling over walls, floor, and Rubenesque stone as the sun moves. Engaged in their silent dialogue of motion and stillness, curves and hard edges, Moyer’s screen and Noguchi’s woman offer a strange, potentially private interior scene we’ve stumbled onto. Our sudden presence in their midst—a new character in the dream—sparks a shift in tone until we exit again.
In the presentation of her work, Moyer hopes to create a space of mysterious encounter, a scenario in which the viewer “can’t quite define what it is, and there is just enough information missing to let them develop their own interpretations.” This is not dissimilar to how the filmmaker David Lynch, a master of fabricating unsettling dreamscapes from the most mundane spaces (roadside diners, suburban living rooms), described his intent to stray from logical progression and tidy answers: “I keep hoping people will like abstractions, space to dream, consider things that don’t necessarily add up.”
World builders like Lynch, and cinema’s ability to evoke a mood more broadly, have fundamentally shaped Moyer’s artistic sensibility. She grew up on studio sets in Hollywood, where her father was a lighting designer. The “dream factory” introduced her to an industry expert in manufacturing illusions—props, scenery, light, weather, all fabricated into false worlds that exist unto themselves. Robert Edmond Jones, a twentieth-century American theater designer noted for his pared-down, surreal sets, described how creating scenery is a kind of alchemy: “Everything that is actual must undergo a strange metamorphosis, a kind of sea-change, before it can become truth in the theatre.” Jones was writing on theatrical stage design, but his statement holds true for cinema, and speaks to the transfigured and illusory quality of a movie set that hooked Moyer.
“I was in my house, but it wasn’t my house.” For anyone who’s ever tried to explain their dream—or had to suffer the recounting of someone else’s—this is a familiar contradiction. “It was, but it wasn’t” seems to be the best way we’ve found to describe the simultaneously strange and ordinary worlds our subconscious builds. Separated from “real” life, the sleeping mind generates its own images, where the rules of space and time relax. We can slip easily from a nondescript office to our second-grade classroom, except that the door leads outside to a field we’ve never seen. Shifts in scene and character occur seamlessly, and we accept them unfazed; in dreams, unburdened by rational thought, the illogical tends to make perfect sense.
This incongruity is at the heart of Sam Moyer’s work. Stone becomes weightless, windows function more like walls, and canvas parades as marble slab. The laws of physics don’t seem to apply. Ranging from early dyed paintings to recent handmade paper works, the objects in Woman with Holes reveal the artist’s engagement with abstraction as a kind of dream logic—snippets from life partially resurfacing, recognizable forms encountered in a strange context. The works offer a sliver of something recognizable, and we’re left to complete the picture.
At the Hill Art Foundation, Moyer has put her work into conversation with objects from the Hill collection that similarly exist on the outer edges of reason. The artists she has selected use illusionism, replication, or unexpected materials to present commonplace forms in the guise of abstraction and uncanny realism. Sometimes absurd, but always grounded in the familiar, their works are haunted by everyday life: a sink drain stuck in the wall, an inexplicably oversized rubber eraser, a window that offers no view. As in dreams, real things find their shadows here.
The show is organized as a series of vignettes, discrete groupings that seem to have been cobbled together by an unconscious mind. In one alcove sits a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, a wavy little figure carved from pink and white marble. Titled Woman With Holes II (1969), the sculpture’s smooth surface is interrupted by a peppering of small divots. She might be cheekily dimpled or punctured, slowly deflating. The figure sits mute, as the light outside the picture window builds and fades over the course of the day, filtered by Moyer’s Screen for Mure-cho (2025). Made from handmade paper pulp, the latticework construction casts a gridded shadow pattern around the room, rippling over walls, floor, and Rubenesque stone as the sun moves. Engaged in their silent dialogue of motion and stillness, curves and hard edges, Moyer’s screen and Noguchi’s woman offer a strange, potentially private interior scene we’ve stumbled onto. Our sudden presence in their midst—a new character in the dream—sparks a shift in tone until we exit again.
In the presentation of her work, Moyer hopes to create a space of mysterious encounter, a scenario in which the viewer “can’t quite define what it is, and there is just enough information missing to let them develop their own interpretations.” This is not dissimilar to how the filmmaker David Lynch, a master of fabricating unsettling dreamscapes from the most mundane spaces (roadside diners, suburban living rooms), described his intent to stray from logical progression and tidy answers: “I keep hoping people will like abstractions, space to dream, consider things that don’t necessarily add up.”
World builders like Lynch, and cinema’s ability to evoke a mood more broadly, have fundamentally shaped Moyer’s artistic sensibility. She grew up on studio sets in Hollywood, where her father was a lighting designer. The “dream factory” introduced her to an industry expert in manufacturing illusions—props, scenery, light, weather, all fabricated into false worlds that exist unto themselves. Robert Edmond Jones, a twentieth-century American theater designer noted for his pared-down, surreal sets, described how creating scenery is a kind of alchemy: “Everything that is actual must undergo a strange metamorphosis, a kind of sea-change, before it can become truth in the theatre.” Jones was writing on theatrical stage design, but his statement holds true for cinema, and speaks to the transfigured and illusory quality of a movie set that hooked Moyer.
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