MOSES SUN
21 CHAMBERS: A NEW BEGINNING
SEPTEMBER 1 - SEPTEMBER 28, 2022
OPENING RECEPTION - FIRST THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 2022, 5-8PM
ARTIST MEET & GREET - SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 12-3PM
J. Rinehart Gallery announces our first solo exhibition with multi-media artist, muralist, and curator, Moses Sun. 21 Chambers: A New Beginning is a collection of large-scale digital and analog paintings based on the artists own memories and experiences.
Well known for his large-scale murals, public projects, and for his recent curatorial work, Moses Sun fuses hip-hop, jazz, afrofuturism, and the black southern diaspora of his childhood into a celebrated mix of flowing visuals that blurs the lines between digital and analog art.
21 Chambers: A New Beginning is a continuation of his ongoing series of meditative digital and analog paintings that reflect an inner world of hope and forgiveness in a time of crisis. Each image peels away painful memories in a tornado of color, texture, and line. They represent courage, love, magic, soul, and blackness in a time of introspection. Transparency is used to camouflage and distort the past until it contorts into a garden of playful shapes meant to invite the viewer in.
Moses Sun studied Film and Drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago and received an Associates of Fine Art from the University of North Carolina. As part of the Vivid Matter Collective, Sun completed the ‘M’ in the Black Lives Matter mural in Seattle WA in 2020 opening him up to additional mural commissions with the Wing Luke Museum, Facebook Open Arts, Arc’teryx, the Starbucks Art Program, and many others. His curatorial practice has led him to create exhibitions of Afrofuturism at the Frye Art Museum and the Museum of Museums. Most recently Sun was chosen as an Amazon Artist in Residence for 2022. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
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21 Chambers: A New Beginning
Exhibition Statement
My work expresses blackness across multiple media platforms, laying bare my personal history, and humanity. I make drawings on paper and iPad, digital and analogue photographs, sculpture, and installations, then sample them and in the hip-hop ethos of "grinding" output them as relief sculptures, digital prints, video animations, games, and social media apps. I work intuitively, letting go of pretense so that the story reveals to the viewer an entry point, a beginning but never an end.An exchange between my ancestors and I occurs with each studio session, breeding a ferocious need to visualize the connections I see between cultures and belief. My work bears witness to my struggle to make sense of an inhumane world. The weight of years of chaotic personal, political, and social change has helped me to understand that much of my work is a visual meditation, searching for meaning when words fail.
I have turned my back on the worst parts of the European diaspora that colonized my mind, life, and art. I turn to African, Black, Latinx, Middle Eastern, and Asian diasporas that have accepted me whole and given me strength when Whiteness has taken what it pleases, disposing of what it deemed too much and too loud.
21 Chambers: A New Beginning
Twenty-one chambers is a series of meditative digital paintings and drawings reflecting an inner world of hope and forgiveness in a time of crisis. Each image peels away painful memories in a tornado of color, texture, and line. They represent courage, love, magic, soul, and blackness in a time of introspection. Transparency is used to camouflage and distort the past until it contorts into a garden of playful shapes meant to invite the viewer in.