The exhibition responds to a distinctly local vernacular while reflecting on the interplay between the built and natural environments. The show represents a culmination of many years of studio practice, bringing together long-standing techniques such as faux coral rock with new explorations like aluminum casting.
Drawing on his background in design and architecture, Moore works at the intersection of utility and sculpture, transforming industrial remnants and discarded materials into refined forms. Aluminum seating elements, chairs, benches, and tables are composed of I-beams, grating, and cast impressions of tree trunks and mussel shells then painted in vivid neon pink, a color Moore describes as “pure and primal, the color of flesh, flowers, and flamingos,” embodying a duality that is at once sensual and violent, beautiful and grotesque. Seductive and hyperreal, neon pink evokes the cheap glow of open signs and strip clubs while also appearing in natural phenomena and the very gases that make up our world. This negotiation between raw infrastructure and ecological fragility mirrors Miami itself: a city of constant construction layered atop a deep history of habitation and biodiversity.
Above the seating, lamps carved from Moore’s signature process of using scrap EPS foam resemble massive coral rock formations yet float improbably from the trees. These works reference Miami’s oolitic limestone bedrock, the geological foundation that made development possible, while underscoring cycles of reuse, illusion, and transformation. A 3D-printed bowl composed of interwoven mussel shells and disposable lighters extends this thread, drawing parallels between ancient Native shell mounds at the mouth of the Miami River and contemporary monuments of waste.
“I designed and built my own house in Miami and I make my own furniture. All my concepts for work are tested in my home,” Moore explains. That personal ethos of functionality grounds the exhibition: even as the works embody histories of consumption, cycles of accumulation, and tensions between artifice and authenticity, they remain usable as seating, tables, or lighting, anchoring sculpture in the everyday.
Moore’s practice, rooted in Miami, merges design and fine art to address themes of material transformation, nature and ecology, and the unfinished infrastructures of the urban landscape. His works embody a careful balance of humor, rigor, and experimentation, transforming waste into form and functional objects into cultural vessels.
An exploded view is a drawing or diagram that represents how the component parts of an object fit together. These drawings reveal the assembly and underlying structure and logic of an object. The outward appearance of a coconut does not tell you what is inside of it. To create an exploded view of a coconut would reveal the thick skin, the husk, the shell, the meat, and the cavity that holds fluid. In the same way, if you were to create an exploded view of Miami Beach through the lens of history, you would see its origins as a coconut farm. In the early days, this was the only value people could see in the land.
Exploded View: Coconut, is a series of functional objects that place materiality at the forefront and overtly reveal their constituent parts with an emphasis on a local vernacular. A series of chairs are created using concrete breeze blocks. These iconic tropical blocks are ubiquitous locally as well as globally and are used in every possible mode; hiding dumpsters and parking garages to luxury residential. Other seating elements are created using new and repurposed elements from construction; I-beams, corrugated steel, and repurposed Dade-County Pine. This very dense pine, which is nearly extinct and longer available for construction, is now reappearing due to home renovations and demolitions, and tells a story of construction 100 years ago. Other planar components that act as privacy screens are created using repurposed corrugated steel cut from shipping containers converted into architecture. Another functional object takes form in a block made of reconfigured chunks of EPS foam, sculpted and manipulated to look like a block of oolitic limestone, the bedrock of South Florida.
Inspired to find community solutions to the issue of food scarcity and increasing food prices caused by the Covid pandemic and rising inflation rates, artist and designer Emmett Moore (b. 1988, Miami FL) looked to the 20th century wartime model of home gardening as inspiration for this site-specific installation.
Victory Garden activates MOCA’s Paradise Courtyard using repurposed steel drums as material for large-scale sculptures that not only act as a conduit for connecting the North Miami community to food education resources, but also as a connection to the global community as steel drums are used in many contexts from steel pan instruments in Trinidad and Tobago and DIY planters around the world. Visitors can sit, relax and recharge in solar-powered spaces within the sculptures, which are planted with a variety of hardy, low-maintenance edible plants and grasses native to South Florida and the Caribbean.
Through workshops and virtual guided planting resources, Victory Garden aims to empower visitors to start their own gardens, and features community organizations including Ready-To-Grow Gardens, Finca Morada and Urban Greenworks, that provide spaces for learning and creating dialogue. As the installation progresses, at harvest there will be a range of edible plants from cilantro to starfruit as well as plants that are helpful to pollinators. In this way Moore’s project is creating a fuller ecosystem that encourages visitors to consider the ways we are all interconnected and how change can be both incremental and monumental.
19’6” H 5’D W 5’D
EPS, Aluminum, Coral Rock, Urethane, Electrical Hardware, Latex Paint, Acrylic Paint
A large-scale sculpture made of faux coral rock, the material that over hundreds of thousands of years became the bedrock underlying South Florida. The surfaces are embellished with scratchiti and found objects becoming contemporary fossils, and various hues of color built up like years of paint that accrues on architectural ruins.
For this exhibition, Moore presents a series of functional sculpture and design objects primarily made of T-shirt fabric. With his singular approach to materials and process, Moore has created a thrilling, unexpected body of work that responds both to Constructivist and Modernist design sensibilities, as well as the global flow of commodities.
Moore sourced the shirts in bulk from used-clothing wholesalers. These businesses, which operate out of warehouses in Miami’s industrial neighborhoods, sell donated or trashed garments for pennies a pound. The clothes are graded in terms of quality, then turned to rags or exported to different markets across the globe, where they are sorted and resorted, sold and resold. From his home on the Miami River, Moore watched freighters taking shipping containers filled with bushels of clothing to the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and beyond. Moore takes the name of the exhibition, Danica Sunbeam, from one of these vessels. Somewhere between fashion items and raw material, the T-shirts Moore selected for his pieces are soaked in a slow-drying epoxy, then wrinkled to provide structural integrity. Moore then shapes them to molds referencing the standardized dimensions of building materials: 2x4 beams; sheets of plywood; the dimensions of the shipping containers themselves. The objects reference the dimensions of their dispersal across economies, political borders, and the globe.
The matte, monochromatic surfaces of these works beguile; they seem to ripple and undulate, yet are frozen in their form. These intricate folds reference classical marbles, specifically the draping robes seen in statuary by the Greek sculptor Phidias. By using epoxy to affix them in their final forms, Moore’s process refers to Gaudi’s use of glue-soaked ropes to achieve impossible forms in the Sagrada Familia. He wrinkles and wraps the cotton to obscure most of the identifying elements of clothing: the tags, the buttons, the graphics might briefly appear, but for the most part are absent. Beyond underscoring the ubiquitous materiality of the cotton shirts, the furniture references various moments in twentieth-century design: a constructivist table with a glass top, as well as a mid-century coffee table paired with an armchair riffing on an iconic Eames design. On the walls will be a series of gridded sculptural shelves, which refer both to the shipping containers, and the pattern they make when loaded onto the ships. With Danica Sunbeam, Emmett Moore turns his eye for irony and material refinement towards thirdworld economies and disposable consumerism, allowing viewers to reconsider the everyday materials and forms of the surrounding world.
“On display are sculptures and panels that reference Moore’s design practice and the formal qualities of modernist and Minimalist sculpture, while taking visual cues from Miami’s environs. The title of the exhibition refers to the surfaces of the forms, but also hints phonetically at the combination of fractal and architecture.
At the center of the show is a series of wall-mounted concrete panels that are folded to mimic architectural elements. Using the one-foot square concrete block as a starting point (such as those seen in Florida’s iconic breeze-block designs), Moore makes simple variations—crease lines, bevel cuts, 45-degree rotations—to create a wall sculpture. In a second series, grids of white mortar tiles are carefully interrupted at certain angles, to appear fractured but to fit seamlessly together in a system of junctures and unions. Both of these series are made with a unique material cocktail that includes cement, water-based resin, fiberglass, and colored dye.
Also on view is a panel made from overlapping layers of perforated stainless steel, offset at an angle to create disorienting visual effects. The most direct reference to architecture is a pair of sculptures that mimic steel awnings, featuring just the metal armature with out any fabric covering, freestanding in the middle of the gallery.
Fracture displays Moore’s flexibility as a producer of objects. Hesitant to differentiate between art and design, he recalibrates structures in a way that is not immediately recognizable. This show expands his scope as it finds him focusing on architecture in addition to the design objects he is best known for. Looking atarchitects such as Carlo Scarpa, and Minimalist artists such as Frank Stella, Moore takes an economy of materials and production techniques to generate these works. Fracture explores how systems—industrial, geometric, utilitarian—are formed, break down, and can be transformed into something new.”
Patrick Parrish Gallery in conjunction with Gallery Diet are pleased to present Emmett Moore’s first solo NYC exhibition. The Miami-based artist will be showing a series of works continuing an ongoing fascination with the intersection of computer-aided design and craft-oriented processes. Drawing inspiration from the digital realm, this series of functional objects will be fabricated using traditional furniture materials including wood, glass and steel while replacing traditional joinery with 3D-printed sculptural hubs comprised of digital jumbles of mechanical parts.
“Using digital technologies combined with traditional craft process in the mode of furniture design draws relationships between the outside universe, our digital environment, and the inside space of a domestic interior.” -Emmett Moore
“An exploration of materiality, geometry, and a digital design process. At the heart of this series is an interest in reconstituting versions of everyday objects and objects from the local vernacular, using their original material and geometric qualities to create functional modules for furniture.
In this series Moore has created a room divider using blown-up versions of postcards from Miami Beach featuring bikini-clad beachgoers digitally printed on wood. The digital printing process is also present in a handmade quilt printed to look as though a number of the artist’s possessions spread out on a moving blanket.
The artist’s interest in materiality and geometry is evident in a book shelf that seems to be lean precariously on a basketball (in fact it’s mechanically attached and the basketball is solid cast rubber), and a coffee table made from “six-pack” modules of 112 aluminum cans all painstakingly machined by hand.”
For his exhibition Human Factory at The Bass’ temporary gallery space, BassX, in 2016, Moore takes inspiration from the quintessential design manual “Human Dimension and Interior Space” by Julius Pinero and Martin Zelnik. Using standard calculations from the source book as referents for the scale and dimensions of this new body of work, Moore creates a trio of sculptures that challenge and call attention to the human body’s relation to designed forms. The artist writes:
“Good design is thought to be democratic by nature, but if a design is based on human proportions it must be modeled around a small group of the population in order to accommodate the rest.
For this reason, dimensions in furniture and interior design processes are based on either the 5th, or 95th percentile of the population. There is no such thing as an average person, and so to create objects that suit such an individual would be to exclude more than half the population.
This and other counter-intuitive systems that govern the creation of man-made objects, especially ones that directly relate to human dimension, are meant to go unnoticed. The playful relationship that I have developed with these invisible systems is explored here.”
The title "Methods of Action" is based on a phrase Charles Eames used to describe design. The interactive installation will take place at three different stops for public transportation around Downtown Miami. Three iconic chairs, Jens Rizom’s Lounge Chair, the Eames shell chair, and the Emeco 1006 “Navy” chair will be chained to public Bus stops for use by the public. The project will re-democratize three classic American designs originally intended for the masses. All three chairs were designed around technological advancements and material restrictions brought on by WWII. All three chairs have been co-opted by high-end manufacturers and assimilated into an elite design vernacular. Placing the chairs at bus-stops counters a form of mass-market design that aims to dissuade users from getting too comfortable. Bringing these chairs into the public realm makes these chairs accessible once again while creating a playful and uncanny scenario.
“In his 1993 essay “It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp,” Donald Judd asserts the complicated relationship between furniture and art object: “If a chair or a building is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous. The art of a chair is not its resemblance to art, but is partly its reasonableness, usefulness and scale as a chair.” For Judd, these things certainly co-existed, and it is possible to trace the inf luence from one to the other. Similar to Judd in regard to his furniture, Emmett Moore has placed function at the fore. His pieces in the main space at Gallery Diet are meant to be interacted with, and are ultimately designed as pieces for the domicile.
There is an inevitable distress, then, with how to read them in a gallery. When considering these editioned pieces against an art-historical backdrop, relationships to Formalism and Minimalism can be easily conjured. With regard to design, they deploy Modernist influences that break tradition via clean pragmatism. Moore perhaps quotes histories to acknowledge and depart from their trappings and open a new conversation less preoccupied with polarity. He uses their overlapping attributes to his advantage to probe a deeper underlying phenomenon.
Interested in sculptural problem solving, function, and fabrication, Moore reduces tables, hanging lights, and wall tiles to smart and basic forms. Computer rendering programs can allow for a certain level of fantasy: you can skew the perspective, apply surface treatments, select and perfect, just by sending commands.
Transcribing this to the physical construction process presents a set of challenges and absurdities. With “Sliced Parallelepiped Lights” (2012) and “Rainbow Bookmatches” (2012), the discrepancy between the rendering and the real objecthood is cleverly self-evident. The boxes surrounding the lights are constructed as though they were 2-dimensional drawings made to look like 3-dimensional objects. From one angle they appear square, but up close they are actually impeccably constructed parallelogram boxes. “Rainbow Bookmatches” (2012) applies a different aspect of illusion. Bookmatching is a technique where a material such as wood veneer or marble is mirrored to create a facing pattern—like a Rorschach test. Here, the bookmatching occurred in the rendering first, and then the overall shape of the wall tiles was skewed. It is not real marble slabs but a digital image of mirrored marble pattern printed directly onto the wood; otherwise, the shapes and relative patterns would not match. Moore’s obvious use of an artificial façade provides the sophisticated framework of Surface Tension. A reverse trompe l’oeil is imposed on objects in the form of mica, print, or veneer as an indicator that taps into a long cultural history of building, design, and status.
In the project room, a series of collaborative works between Moore, and RISD classmates artists Chris Johnson and Connor Klein establishes a link to the artistic process. Styrofoam, models, and misleading plays on material are the visual jokes, the “how it’s made,” the truthful remnants of the distilled forms in the main space. This appendix lends supplemental meaning to Moore’s other objects, where they otherwise (especially in proximity to Miami’s Design District) might be accepted or dismissed as just sleek furniture pieces in a show room. This discussion about the tendency in design to cosmetically obfuscate the components of domestic and architectural objects is effective and important to reading the show. It is a very sophisticated conceptual dimension that might have otherwise eluded viewers; the furniture’s mere presence in the gallery space would not have been enough to open that critical conversation. Perhaps, then, Surface Tension offers insight not only into Moore’s practices, but also into the tension between the domestic and the gallery, functional and aesthetic, real and simulated.”
Cara Despain - The Miami Rail
A hybrid of interior design and sculpture, High, Low and in Between represents Moore's most deliberate blurring of the two disciplines to date. Operating as an all-encompassing, immersive environment, the installation incorporates various design elements that work together to create a cohesive whole. Though following the logic and aesthetic tenets of interior design, architecture, and furniture production, High, Low and in Between resists functionality in favor of aesthetic experience.
Fascinated by patterns both manufactured and natural, Moore has fabricated by hand, a series of relief wall panels, and sculptural-architectural adaptations using a grid-based design process. Sourced from a variety of everyday patterns such as the security print found on the inside of envelopes, laminates, wood grain, and the covers of composition notebooks, the patterns in High, Low and in Between appear recurring, yet upon closer inspection, do not repeat exactly. By covering both two and three-dimensional surfaces with such patterns, Moore both recontextualizes these patterns and de-centers viewers by disrupting scale and depth perception.
