Ágnes Berecz
ALL THIS AND NOT ORDINARY
On Friday, August 27 of 2021, the US media was reporting on suicide bombers, legal proceedings, cryptocurrencies, vaccine mandates, and the approach of tropical storm Ida. On Shelter Island, Jill Moser was working in the studio on a series of small-scale collages called daily meditations, temperatures were well over eighty degrees with thunder forecast in the vicinity around 2 in the afternoon. When the day was done and the meditation ended, 8.27.21 was made. There is no how, nor why, only when. What is a work's relationship to its time? What is its time? Is it the time of its maker?
WHAT IS CUT. WHAT IS CUT BY IT.
Measuring roughly eight by eight inches, 8.27.21 is constructed from colored pieces of paper. It is an arrangement of machine-made and hand-made, dense and lean, smooth and textured surfaces that cover, align, overlap with and bulge underneath each other. Cutting is both an act and a boundary, and in 8.27.21 papers are sliced, colors are carved, and borders declared. Lines thin and thick, literal and painted, quiver and waver. 8.27.21 is a sculpted terrain, an imaginary topography. It is about the process of assembling things to make a place, about the contingencies of the hand, and about the desire to declare, and at the same time, erase boundaries.
THERE IS A KIND.
Made of competing layers of paper and gouache that play hide-and-seek with each other, 8.27.21 is a densely saturated sequence of various greens, grayish lilac, and magenta. Bold, solid, and porous, none of the colors evoke nature. Some, like the magenta stripes, have a loud, even aggressive luminosity that complements the haptic violence of cutout papers. But are they magenta or red violet? Or rose, crimson, reddish purple, or pink? How to call the color of the thin, vertical lines that create an overlaid, asymmetrical frame? Dated, but untitled, 8.27.21 signals the futility of language to name what takes place among its layered cuts and hues. By defying linguistics and resisting geometry, it makes its own rules.
* Lines in italics are quoted from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons.