Art AND: Meredith Moore – BmoreArt

Meredith Moore is a treasure hunter. A self-professed “obsessive” with images, she is frequently seeking symbols in the day-to-day, getting her subjects—sometimes several years right before she makes use of them—and then making unique approaches to pay homage to them in small movies that she produces with a hybrid of vintage and up to date movie equipment. 

Moore arrived in Baltimore in 2006 from Oklahoma to go to MICA on an undergraduate painting scholarship, but fell in really like with video clip just after she took a class on a whim and has not looked back again. Moore has also fallen in really like with Baltimore, a spot she appreciates for its artistic community that, starting with associates of the early 2000s art collective Wham City, has often welcomed her. While her films are not always painterly, just about every just one centers about a central issue, the way a representational painting does, and then utilizes the format of transferring pictures to change the subject matter around and showcase it in a new mild.

“I’m often hunting for interesting and new items that I’ve under no circumstances observed. Like ideal now, I’m on TikTok a ton,” she laughs, describing her inspiration workflow. Moore is fascinated in TikTok for the way it can show a day of an ordinary consumer in a further country—the world accessibility evokes the artist to believe about mundane human commonalities past borders—what a teenager’s early morning routine is like in Saudi Arabia, for illustration. “I know I do have a peculiar sort of goofy way of searching at things,” she carries on, and she classifies this special viewpoint centered on questioning the day-to-day as her style across various current films.

Film is a medium that demands an viewers, but Moore doesn’t worry herself also significantly with what other people today may feel about her work. Considering that the experimental brief film environment is not notably industrial, she feels totally free to make points largely for her 1st viewers, herself. “I do it for myself. This is just how I take a look at everyday living and convey myself,” she suggests. And the resulting is effective are incredibly particular, centered on single motifs that Moore became fixated on for a time: glitter, a lone cat figurine, her grandmother’s salt shaker assortment. Her do the job tells a tale of real objects ordinarily recast in an otherworldly way. She’s not a documentarian, and substantially of what she would make we could possibly simply call “trippy” for her use of strobing, particular results, and a significant dose of the absurd. She’s made music videos in collaboration with various outstanding Baltimore musicians such as Ami Dang and Dan Deacon, and her do the job normally has a audio component that is both musical or the spoken phrase.

Moore works total time as the Electronic Curation and Audiovisual Archives Expert at MICA, exactly where she also teaches exclusive outcomes in the Film and Video clip Section. This do the job retains her chaotic, so it’s really hard sometimes to carve out the time important to perform on her own projects. For the earlier two decades, she has been doing work on what will be a about twelve-minute movie about her grandmother’s salt shaker assortment. Moore filmed it pre-pandemic and has been participating in with some of the footage in her training workshops, working with clips of her grandmother applying her walker exterior and adding an explosion styled out of a Jason Bourne film behind her. The result is humorous, of course, but also bittersweet her grandmother is now 94 and resides in assisted living, and her dementia has worsened quickly because of to the isolation of the pandemic. Moore’s project has fundamentally develop into a time capsule of her grandmother prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Centered on just one woman’s selection amassed above a life span considering that 1947, the film is a appreciate take note to their romantic relationship and a poignant reminder that it is how we expend our time that eventually becomes our legacy.

In her Charles Village studio past November, Moore and I talked about analog technologies, Baltimore’s music scene, and getting your self significantly as an artist.

Subject: Meredith Moore, 34
Wearing: Classic cotton mesh shirt from Depop, classic slacks from Bottle of Bread, earrings by Models, sneakers from Camper
Location: Charles Village