Elegies for Empire: Selections from Andrew Moore’s Inside Havana and Russia: Beyond Utopia

August 28 - January 15, 2012

Green Trucks, White Night, Russia, 2002

Opening reception: Sunday, September 18, 2011
3:00 – 6:00 pm

Eight works, four each from the photographic series Inside Havana (1998-2002) and Russia: Beyond Utopia (2000-2004), are brought together here to provide context for Detroit Disassembled: Photographs by Andrew Moore, organized by the Akron Art Museum, on the first floor. Moore uses 8×10 and 4×5 view cameras to mix picture-making and story-telling into atmospheric images which contain layers of time. Symbols of twentieth-century empires coexist with icons of those that came before, as in Green Trucks White Nights, 2002, in which a military installation on the Solovki archipelago abuts a Russian Orthodox monastery used as a prison by both the czars and the Soviet regime. Similarly, in El Almendron, 1998, the American and Spanish spheres of influence within Cuba’s own still-extant Communist regime take the form of a red 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air parked at a crumbling Moorish Art Nouveau townhouse. (In this picture, Moore points out visual sympathies between the design of the house and the car-like all those preserved from the 1950s, referred to as an “almond” because of its distinctive curves.) Although made almost a decade earlier, the Russian and Cuban pictures predict Moore’s engagement with Detroit, also a symbol of a mighty power over which time and nature have reasserted themselves in a potent mix of horror and beauty.

These works are generously lent by the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.