Brooke Moyse: Deep Play
Installation view: Brooke Moyse: Deep Play, Norte Maar, September 28-November 3, 2024. Photo: Jason Andrew
Studio of Brooke Moyse, September 2024. Photo: Jason Andrew
BROOKE MOYSE: DEEP PLAY
Sept 28-Nov 3, 2024
Opening Reception: Sat, Sept 28, 3-6p
Hours: Sat + Sun, 1-5pm, or by appointment
Directions: Norte Maar, 88 Pine Street, Cypress Hills, Brooklyn
J/Z Train to Brooklyn, Crescent Street Stop
Norte Maar presents a new group of paintings by Brooke Moyse with an exhibition titled “Deep Play.” Celebrating our 20th Anniversary, Norte Maar looks back at artists we have championed—many artists were given their first solo show through our exhibition program which began in regularity in a Bushwick apartment gallery on Wyckoff Avenue in 2009. There’s no better way to look back, than to look forward. Brooke Moyse was one of the first painters we championed.
Brooke Moyse makes playful and gestural abstract acrylic paintings on canvas. The works often have a central composition suggesting a portrait or portal with a large abstract shape encompassing most of the canvas. The shapes are loosely and spontaneously rendered at a bodily scale, with holes, curves, bumps, grooves, and slopes defining the edges. Brush strokes create patterns and blocks of color, revealing shapes within shapes within shapes. The overall space moves in and out of the frame, forward and backward, up and down, like film moving through the light of a projector.
As a college student, Brooke became interested in plein air landscape painting, and that experience imprinted the Hudson Valley landscape in particular on her psyche. Her interest in nature and landscape led to a deep wondering about the way in which landscape usurped religious iconography in painting as a method for describing ecstatic connection—landscape and its social contexts leading to Impressionism and finally to Modern abstraction as integrated through Georgiana Houghton as well as Hilma af Klint and her circle in the Western art canon. Landscape and natural forms draw us closer to union with the universe, and through this painting exploration Brooke keeps working to find that euphoric truth.
“What is the difference between simple play and deep play? Simple play can take many forms and have many purposes, but it goes only so far. When it starts focusing one’s life and offering ecstatic moments, it becomes deep play. ….Deep play is not always positive and uplifting… However, in deep play’s altered mental state one most often finds clarity, revelation, acceptance of self, and other life-affirming feelings.”
– Deep Play, by Diane Ackerman
Brooke Moyse has exhibited at Norte Maar, Storefront Gallery, Centotto, Loretta Howard Gallery, and Kathryn Markel Fine Art among others in New York City, at David Klein Gallery in Detroit, and at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Singapore. She was awarded residencies at Catwalk, and at Millay Arts in 2024. Her work has been mentioned in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, The New Criterion, and The New York Times. Brooke graduated with a BA from Bard College, and an MFA from NYU, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
