NEW YORK, NY.- DC Moore Gallery is presenting Interlayered, an exhibition of work by Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, Whitfield Lovell, and Chie Fueki. Each of these artists create intricate explorations of space, meaning, and memory. Interweaving repetition, reference, order, and disjunction, each artwork contains complex networks of relations. These relationships extend inward and outwards, including the viewer in a participatory search for meaning.

On view are rare examples of Valerie Jaudon’s earliest paintings, which add context to a major 1976 painting currently on view at MoMA in the acclaimed exhibition, Woven Histories. A pioneer of Postminimalism, Jaudon subverted the dominant conventions of geometric abstraction, merging references to the decorative traditions of Islamic and Celtic art, as well as Gothic architecture. Jaudon was drawn to the intricate designs of these traditions, as well as their duality of being highly cultivated and broadly popular arts. She sees abstraction as a shared form of communication: “A painting is a kind of decoding device for the culture from which it comes. We live in a world that’s complicated and abstract––nothing is simple anymore.” Jaudon interweaves open-ended systems of straight lines and curves to create subtly disordered order. These interlocking patterns, while seemingly continuous, are full of stops and starts, creating a labyrinthine network of disruptions and possibilities.

Joyce Kozloff has been known since the 1970s for her political and feminist artwork addressing cross-cultural issues. In the 1990s, Kozloff began using cartography as a framework to draw out connections between patterns of political, social, economic, and cultural power. Densely overlapping systems of information, she creates literal and conceptual collages. Her three Bodies of Water paintings (1997-98) are rare instances of the artist incorporating the body into her mapping works. Kozloff layers diagrams of the human circulatory, digestive, and respiratory systems over navigational charts of the Baltic Sea. Kozloff created the works after traveling these waterways herself, inflecting the supposedly objective form of the map with her direct experience. Merging the macro and the microscopic, the works investigate the embodied experience of movement and travel and the creation of knowledge.

Whitfield Lovell’s The Card Pieces (2018-2022) is a room-sized installation of fifty-three works. Previously shown at museums including the Mint Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Cincinnati Art Museum in the exhibition Whitfield Lovell: Passages organized by the American Federation of Arts, this is the first time the work has been shown in New York City. In the work, Lovell pairs an image of an individual with a collaged playing card from a vintage deck, fifty-two cards and one joker. Connoting luck, chance, or fate, these pairings of cards and faces ask us to consider the hand we are dealt and the way we play the game. In this work, Lovell’s fascination with history and untold stories dovetails with his own memories of family. As he explains, his interest in cards stems from “cards being so present in my culture growing up. There was always a deck of cards present whether people were playing cards or not.” The series draws our attention to the formal features of cards, the numbers, suits, and designs of the cards suggesting personality, experiences or meaning associated with the juxtaposed figures. Exploring kinship, each individual stands in relation to the larger group, with possible connections drawn through proximity, placement in the deck, or potential for play.

Chie Fueki, a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, is known for her singular, striking paintings that explore memory and longing. Her current paintings collapse time and place, portraiture and landscape, creating reflective shared spaces animated by light and energy. Drawing on her experience growing up in a Japanese community in São Paolo, Brazil, Fueki synthesizes art historical languages, culturally-coded signifiers, and personal emblems. Layering cut and painted papers, Fueki’s complex, tactile surfaces create a nuanced interplay between the viewer and the painting: “While I invite the viewer to participate in building associations and meaning through the forms depicted on my surfaces, I also want them to feel the weight of the wooden panel on the wall, the size of the painting-support about their body, and the surfaces that refract, absorb light, shine and reflect at them. In the mid-19th century, the philosopher Robert Vischer invented the term Einfühlung or empathy theory. He wrote that a viewer unconsciously projects its bodily form––and with this also the soul––into the form of the object.”