Dream dirges - artist Moira Dryer

Art in America, Nov, 1994 by Holland Cotter

In her short but varied career, Moira Dryer produced paintings and sculpture - works in which a fin-de-siecle irony coexists with a romantic depth of feeling.

Moira Dryer's last exhibition, at Mary Boone in the winter of 1992, remains vivid in memory [see A.i.A., June 1992]. The seven paintings were among the strangest and most beautiful to be seen in New York that season, and for anyone who knew this artist primarily from her wry, modest, half-sculptural works of the mid-'80s, they projected a startling expressive intensity. The show had an unusually long run. Boone kept it up for over two months after Dryer, who had lived with breast cancer for five years, became critically ill. She died in May of that year, age 35.

The works were big, averaging 6 by 7 feet, and were painted in acrylic on large sheets of plywood, often backed by a second, slightly recessed sheet of wood. In some cases, as in a painting titled Damage & Desire, Damage & Desire (1991), round holes about the size of a nickel had been drilled through the surface; one looked through them to the backing layer which had been painted black. Apparently randomly placed, the perforations looked like bullet holes, though they also suggested constellations.

If the paintings were thus "damaged," they were also unusually alluring. The colors were striking, never bright or saturated, but metallic and shot through with yellow or gray. The reds, for instance, had the peculiar darkness of venous blood. Some of the blues appeared jaundiced. Greens had a sublimal red blush, creating the same chromatic mix of complementaries that Hitchcock used over and over to unnerving effect in Vertigo. The whole show, in fact, looked as if it had been perversely hated, though, in fact, only the gallery's standard overhead spots had been used.

Also distinctive were the images that resulted from Dryer's handling of paint. As is the case with all of her work, these paintings looked provocatively underproduced, with matte surfaces more like watercolor than acrylic and allover patterns more like fabric design than abstract paintings. Thinned pigment was washed on in vertical bands to suggest the volumetric folds of curtains, or it ran downward from a loaded brush in fluid patterns that resembled watered silk or tie-dye. Illusionistic images were alluded to. Some paintings suggested light glowing up from under flowing water; others evoked the body. The shroudlike More Random Fire (1991) was speckled with what appeared to be subcutaneous red-orange blotches, while in the stunning Revenge (1991) two matching scarlet stains bled down in streams over the painting's surface.

The extreme impression of vulnerability and injury in Revenge was underscored by yet another element, the ornamental border that ran around its edges. What appeared from a distance to be a fringe of short, dark, regular lines was actually the mark of the artist's fingerprint dipped in pigment and impressed over and over again in a continuous row on all four sides. Dryer used the fingerprint motif many times in her work and for different reasons - as an ironic comment on the validity of authorship in a media-saturated world and, enlarged, as an abstract self-portrait-but here it is simply the most direct way to incorporate her own literal biological signature into emotion-charged work.

It would be wonderful to see the seven paintings from the Boone show brought together again. In the meantime, Dryer's work was on view in two exhibitions in New York last fall, one a selection of late work at Jay Gorney, the other a small retrospective curated by Robert Storr as part of the Museum of Modern Art's "Projects" series. While the Gorney show confirmed the power and originality of Dryer's final paintings, the Projects exhibition set them squarely in the context of her brief but amazingly varied career, one which produced several different bodies of painting and sculpture (often simultaneously) and drew freely upon the influence of other artists to create a richly personal, even autobiographical art bound together by thematic and formal threads.

Dryer was born in Toronto in 1957 and came to New York in the late '70s. She studied for four years at the School of Visual Ads, graduating with a B.F.A in 1980. Her instructors included the late Juan Gonzalez, Keith Sonnier, Will Insley, Judy Pfaff and - specially important, according to Dryer herself - Elizabeth Murray. Dryer worked briefly as a studio assistant for Julian Schnabel, then for some years as a set builder for Mabou Mines and other theater troupes on Manhattan's Lower East Side, before turning her attention decisively to her own art in 1985.

Dryer's penchant for juggling different styles and mediums was evident from the start in the paintings she did between the end of school and 1985. They include figurative work (a little like Richard Bosman's), surrealistic scenes (an image of cones floating in space, for example, or another of organic shapes that look like severed blood vessels) and abstractions which suggest fabric patterns. Landscapes and seascapes predominate. Many of them are straightforward images of cloud-filled skies and turbulent oceans in the romantic tradition of Ryder and Homer as well as the Ryder-loving contemporary painter Bill Jensen. Others take the form of allover blue-gray Whistleresque mists. Still others are knotty, emblematic little tableaux that bring to mind the Symbolist-like work of Forrest Bess in the way they seem both stylelessly decorative and intensely coded.