Reveal and Restraint

Abstract

Abstract Sampada Aranke and Ayanah Moor dialogue on the myriad ways Moor intervenes upon art histories of abstraction in her studio practice. This conversation leads to threads and themes in her practice that open up avenues for rethinking liminality, suspension, and ongoingness that are central to this issue of liquid blackness. Moor calls her method “social abstraction,” by reconsidering how abstraction, a practice mis-categorized as one that transcends identity, might be precisely the form for centering black subjectivity. Moor is invested in the racial and gendered aspects that might be latent in abstract practices; where, for example, collage does and does not serve as an operation for encountering black interior or romantic space. Throughout her work, there is a careful attention to restraint as a method of protection, precision, and engagement. Moor's enactment of the processual and suspended logics of form as an aesthetic and social process resonate in the worlds of her paintings as they also leap beyond the panel itself. It's almost as if Moor is allowing her viewer to relish in and embrace the unfixity of a shape, the emergence of a figure, the suspension of a line, as a way to embrace the ongoingness of their own becoming.