Writ Crit: Becca Moore

Becca’s work has a central theme of movement through time while maintaining shared space on the picture plane. The mark is a gestural outline, only giving enough information to show the

individual features of

her subject without filling in information throughout the rest of the face

and body. Each figure in her work maintains their identity as they cycle through each action, which leads me to believe that each

action is

also specific to the subject, yet the actions that the subjects is performing seem to be universal in nature. One of the subjects turns her heads in a five stage process, and anot

her, less specific, subject appears to be getting out of bed. Because these actions

are so simple, they help to support the notion of shared space. As the girl turns her head, we see how little her torso has moved compared to her face. In a way, it is a venn diagram of the action, showing similarities and differences of each step. These pieces are presented with a projection of a photo of the original pose, but when all of the information is reintroduced to the drawings, they lose the ephemeral quality that the drawings possess by themselves. With the projection the drawing become less about the quality of shared space, and more about each individual frame, essentially turning into a five frame animation. This style of illumination is more effective in the piece where less information is given (the getting out of bed outline.) In this case, the projected image doesn’t overlap the information already given to us by the detailed lines on the inside of the figure. In another version of the same series of poses the figure have shaded detail, and appear to be an overall impression of the movement. This one gesture turns into multiple people, like the Flash outrunning his ghosted images. Yet there is no speed in these multiple images, instead they sit heavy on the page, definitively together.Another piece relates back to the larger work, but seems to effectively merge both ideas. The small square etching uses different line tones to create a sense of movement and time in just one frame, without the projection. This image has a lighter touch than the ones before it. It has stillness, in the final pose with the thickest lines, which gives the figure more of a sense of place in the picture plane.

All together these works represent a study of motion, and perhaps the constant motions that every person goes through on a daily basis as they repeat the actions that have grown so familiar. Perhaps that is why Becca has picked such inconspicuous actions to depict in her pictures. This gives the repetition a life outside of the depicted action and movement through time. It implies that the movement will continue endlessly.

(apologies for the crazy photo placement)