[PDF] 
Kristine Moran: The Marsh, The Maze Carol-Ann M. Ryan, Canadian Art, Jan 7, 2010
[PDF] A Painter's Take on the Literature of the North Gary Michael Dault, Globe and Mail, Jan 2, 2010
[PDF] Kristine Moran in New York Amber Villas, ARTINFO, July 17, 2009
[PDF] Kristine Moran pushes her brides to the limit by Kelsey Keith, Flavorwire July 23, 2009
[PDF] Play FlashArtOnline, Feb 2009
[PDF] "A look at Kristine Moran at Kinkead Contemporary," Ed Schad, Artslant.com, August, 2008
Kristine Moran, Angell Gallery Randy Gladman, Artforum.com, May 4, 2005
Kristine Moran: The Marsh, The Maze
Carol-Ann M. Ryan, Jan 7, 2010
In "Hidden in the Shore Maze," her first solo show in Toronto since completing an MFA at Hunter College, Kristine Moran tackles literary depictions of the Canadian wilderness and its symbolic relationship to woman in a bold new series of paintings.
Displaying a confidence that comes with a painter’s experience, she visually captures the allure, sensuality and looming danger associated with a woman in the woods. Semi-abstract, these paintings are robust in application and rich in colour. Both large and small are equally captivating; each piece packs a punch.
Thick paint sits upon thinly applied veils. Moran’s marks are quick and gestural; they envelop hints of representational elements, sometimes masking and sometimes highlighting images beneath. Loaded with contradiction, these paintings are composed of wild brushwork that is loose and energetic, yet controlled enough to project a sense of purpose and intention.
Each painting captures a small world, a peek into a secluded cabin, marsh or forest interior. At times the view is too close to truly determine a subject, as in Immersed, an intimate painting that lives up to its promise, literally bringing the viewer into a sumptuous abstract abyss. Woven Lair, on the other hand, is a mysterious scene that hints at vegetation and evidence of human habitation.
Above the others, Woven Lair flaunts Moran’s ability to marry both dense and thinned paint in a composition that reveals as much as it conceals. Quick vertical licks of pigment suggest bulrushes in a marsh rising out of a vibrant blue-green pond.
A large gauze-like white form twists and curves across the surface and floats above all other elements. There is a hint of a woman’s leg peeking out from behind the froth. Centrally concentrated, the composition is framed by sharp diagonals in hyperreal colours that traverse the canvas. The tension created by the opposing forms and dramatic light effects is palpable. Is there a woman beneath the paint? If so, what is she doing there? The large scale of the painting begs you to enter into the scene, if only to pull aside the gauze, flora and fauna to satisfy your curiosity.
Like stories of the far north told by explorers drawn by its danger and opportunity for conquest, Moran’s paintings entice the viewer in ways that cannot be denied. Such well-balanced use of technique and the potential for narrative is rarely achieved, but this series effectively offers both. (55 Mill St Bldg 2, Toronto ON)
A painter's take on the literature of the north
Gary Michael Dault, Jan 2, 2010
A cursory, incautious look at the lush paintings of Kristine Moran - at Clark & Faria in Toronto - may at first suggest a rhapsodic abandon in the artist, a pigment-fuelled fervour that simply valorizes the large, expansive gesture. Her paintings are gestural - almost operatically so.
A quieter, second look, however - plus serious consideration of the title she has given the exhibition, Hidden In the Shore Maze - helps to open her pictures to the ideas than animate them.
And in that regard, she says on the phone from her studio in Brooklyn, N.Y., it is useful to note the degree to which these wild, chromatically intense paintings are rooted in literature. (Raised in Montreal, she graduated from the Ontario College of Art & Design in 2004 and went on to earn a master of fine art degree at Hunter College in New York.) "I guess you could say that my starting point," Moran says, "was Margaret Atwood's Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. It sums up writers who deal with motifs of northernness."
Northernness soon led her to works such as Marian Engel's Bear and Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. Even Northrop Frye's canonical The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination hovers, Moran agrees, somewhere behind the sensuous writhing out of which her paintings come to fruition.
"There's a line in one of the Munro stories," she says, "to the effect that deep caves were paved with kitchen linoleum. You can see how I've used this image almost directly in Trick Door." You can. Whatever else that robustly painted entity is doing, front and centre in the painting, it is decisively located on or in front of an orange-and-white tiled floor.
The fact is, the more time you spend with Moran's work, the less chaotic it seems. She says she constructed a kind of narrative that helped inform the paintings that make up the exhibition (the works have titles such as Departure, Into the Water, Immersed, Undress and Swallowed in Tiny Bits).
It's not a specific, detachable, usable narrative, of course. But you can certainly see how Moran's subtle and obviously displaced "tale" seems to begin in a sort of cabin (which is offered, almost without abstract interference) in Departure: "There is no figurative element here at all," Moran says, "which means that the viewer can easily place himself, herself, inside the narrative."
Similarly, in Into the Water, the bottom of the painting is all structure, part of Moran's mysterious cabin perhaps, or the edge of a dock, while above it a huge painted miasma of supine pinkness (a naked body?) seems to lower itself into the rest of the work. In Undress, there is a suggestion of curtains over at the left of the painting, and perhaps a mirror. The figure itself is a writhing of fleshly grey knee- and elbow-like things - as if Moran had painted a frame of an out-of-focus film.
"The big gestures in my paintings," Moran adds, such as the big gesture that seems to be the protagonist of Trick Door, "are about shifting, transformation. This past summer I was making paintings about marriages, carnivals and other festivities, and the sweeping gestures came to represent swirling dresses, that sort of thing. ...
"Now," she says, "the big gesture is more about coming apart, about the unraveling of the self."
Kristine Moran in New York
Amber Villas, Artinfo, July 17th 2009
Kristine Moran's aptly titled exhibition “Laugh Until My Teeth Fall Out,” her first solo show in New York, now on view at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery through July 25, presents fun and lighthearted paintings that become foreboding with the addition of disjointed limbs or dilapidated carnival rides. The Canadian-born Moran, who lives and works in Brooklyn, focuses on rituals and fantasies connected to weddings, carnivals, and other culturally significant events, using the freshness of her brushwork to draw the viewer in and the addition of subtle psychological undertones to invite further investigation.
Moran's lushly painted surfaces combine patches of high-voltage color with murky backgrounds of blues, browns, and grays. Her paintings, all from 2009, employ an energetic brush mark that creates an effect similar to the trace lines that occur in photographs when a camera is set on a long shutter speed at night. They contain clusters of wavy lines and mounds of color that, from far away, form loosely painted representational images, but up close fall apart into abstraction.
After the Last Dance presents a strong asymmetrical composition with loose passages of paint and sparse sections of impasto combined with dramatic lighting. It also includes a pair of disembodied arms surrounded by the folds of a wedding dress and a floating wedding cake. Alluding to Mary Heilmann's iconic pink and black painting Save the Last Dance for Me (1979), Moran's Dance keeps the tension of the composition in Heilmann's original but adds the arms, which fall toward the bottom-right corner of the work and imply a collapsed bride and a should-have-been-perfect day that did not go exactly according to plan.
The theme of weddings also plays into Moran's Consummated. At just 16 by 20 inches, the painting presents a landscape created from a messy paint application. This, combined with a mountain peak that could be part of a wedding dress or veil, and patches of white that allude to the dress lying bunched up on the floor, implies a passionate night, or at least the vivid memory of one. The insertion of sexual imagery into a painting with energetic abstract marks brings to mind the work of British artist Cecily Brown.
In Merry-Go-Round Broke Down, Moran presents the torso of a white carousel horse with bent legs emerging from the characteristically messy paint. The image of the horse evokes memories of childhood and, like the collapsed bride in After the Last Dance, serves as an example of a fantasy experience that has been deconstructed. Revealing the underbelly in seemingly utopian situations is a theme that carries over from some of Moran's earlier work, which includes images of car crashes, science fiction landscapes, urbanism, and visionary architecture and design. Moran studied landscape architecture before switching to fine arts, and it shows in her architectural layering of brushstrokes and in paintings like Elliptical Eccentricities, in which a building protrudes out of a dense circle of horizontal spinning lights that look like the motion blur generated from a Tilt-A-Whirl spinning at Mach 5.
In the gallery, just to the left of Elliptical Eccentricities, hangs another painting that contains a spinning carnival ride, Leading the Float. Instead of existing at warp speed, though, the Ferris wheel in this work appears to be on its last legs. Bent over in dilapidation, the wheel is positioned on a grassy knoll and set against a forebodingly dark sky. The painting draws attention to the skillfulness of Moran's brushwork, spotlighting a cluster of wide yellow strokes at its center as well as her attention to detail, with a beautifully delicate fringe surrounding the wheel.
Artist Kristine Moran Pushes Her Brides to the Limit
Kelsey Keith, Flavorwire, Thursday Jul 23, 2009
Bridezilla: circus performer : out-of-control wedding : freak sideshow. Kristine Moran is an artist, not an analogist, but her paintings effectively relay the artifice and fancy of elaborate societal rituals. Moran’s latest solo show, Laugh Until My Teeth Fall Out, is on view through the end of the week at Nicelle Beauchene on New York’s Lower East Side. Read on for images and inside scoop from the artist.
Kristine Moran was born in Toronto, got her MFA from Hunter College, and works and resides in Brooklyn (DUMBO and Williamsburg, respectively). She’s also one of the least pretentious contemporary artists you’re likely to meet, explaining her affinity for painters that came before — Cy Twombly and his abstract, mythological Ferragosto series in the 1960s spring to mind — and wondering, “Am I allowed to be painting, considering the history of it?” We’d reply with a resounding affirmative.
For this body of work, which follows a master’s thesis based on a part animal, part human, part structural protagonist reacting to its realistic environment, Moran “expands her dialogue between abstraction and representation” through fantastical, colorful depictions of weddings and carnivals. “After the Last Dance,” one of the strongest images in Laugh Until My Teeth Fall Out, references a Mary Heilmann work with a similar title. According to critic Jan Voerwert, Heilmann’s “Save the Last Dance for Me” encapsulates the debate over the idea of painting after modernism — is the medium still relevant? Riffing on the same theme, Moran’s lush canvas is a psychological breakdown of the issue, asking whether Heilmann was essentially saving painting for herself, and what does happen after the last dance. In this case, the bride throws up her heels and consumes her own head shaped like a wedding cake. But that’s only if you’re feeling literal.
Two other standouts in the exhibition are “Consummated,” all sweeping brushwork and Rococo color underscored by a slightly sinister narrative, and “Merry Go Round Broke Down,” a dystopic vision in which a white horse fills in as the knight in shining armor.
The exhibition is only open through Saturday, July 25, so scurry on down to Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, located at 163 Eldridge Street just north of Grand. Gallery hours are 12-6 p.m.
Play
Marco Tagliafierro, 5 February – 14 March 2009
Monica De Cardenas, Milan
Jackie Wullschlager wrote in the Financial Times (Nov. 2008): “For the generation of artists coming of age now, the decision to become a painter is no less serious or ambitious than it ever was, but it is more fraught with complications…” These words were printed in the press release of the group show “Play,” curated by Nikola Cernetic at Monica De Cardenas gallery. In fact, the exhibition was prompted by this quote.
The statement by Wullschlager, however, is not about a difficult enjoyment of the medium — in relation to the professional contemporary art audience and, as we have become accustomed to in Italy, the 10-year distrust of painting — but is about the need to have a steady and active comparison with other media and above all with the virtuosity of digital and technological sophistication. The data processing hypertext could be for many ‘painters’ an important point of reference for an innovative method that could link quotations from everyday culture with references from animation or alternative visual design, without losing the thread that links painting to its history. Jackie Wullschlager ventures a hypothesis regarding the distinguishing marks of the new way of painting: “Surfaces are dizzying, busy. References are sophisticated, historically astute, laced with humor.”
Cernetic takes up his work, which started with the show “Poker” (also exhibited at Monica De Cardenas in 2007), by interpreting these polysemous paintings as unusual matches between contrasting instincts. Dan Attoe’s noir meets Michael Cline’s oppressive atmospheres, and both could be passed through by Friedrich Kunath’s lost characters, guilty of awful deeds and deep damnation in the manner of Kristine Moran. This show has been conceived as an anti-narrative route, in a David Lynch style, where each painting coincides with a sequence, each pictorial gesture with a frame, following a scheme shown by Amy Bessone’s paintings and through her effective synthetic idea of ‘painting within sculpture’ and of ‘painting within painting.’
(Translated from Italian by Francesca Mila Nemni)
Kristine Moran, May 05 2005 - May 28 2005 Angell Gallery, Toronto
Randy Gladman, Artforum.com May 04 2005
Kristine Moran had a mad crush on Luke Skywalker when she was a child, and she has painted science fiction landscapes—filled with flying cars, high-speed disasters and Jetsons-inspired architecture—ever since.
Displaying her admirably loose handling of vibrant oils, acrylics, and alkyd resins, Moran's new show continues the exploration of ultra-urban speed-driven futuristic landscapes that began with her critically acclaimed solo debut last year at the same gallery. Though still inspired by future-noir films like Blade Runner and Minority Report, she has turned her attention backwards, enhancing her narratives with the visionary ideas of mid-twentieth century utopian theorists such as Constant Nieuwenhuys, Archigram, and R. Buckminster Fuller.
The new paintings attempt to show the state that idealistic theoretical cities of the past would be in today had they actually been built fifty years ago. Predictably, Moran's vision is one of widespread dystopia. Competing groups, each armed with its own ideology, fight over scarce resources. Checkpoints provide inadequate protection for the wealthy, whose gated communities are tucked away in giant geodesic domes on the edge of downtown slums.
Moran's is an alternate future in which the cold utilitarian functionality of Robert Moses battles the moderating intelligence of Jane Jacobs's new urbanism over the soul of the American city.