The Brick Box at the Paramount is pleased to announce the opening of “The Sun Ain’t Stable (Skeleton Makes Good)”, an exhibit of encaustic paintings by Mark Moffett. Encaustic painting, also known as hot wax painting, involves using heated beeswax to which colored pigments are added. For Moffett, “working in wax I have aimed for a method to preserve my tracks as I go, to work backwards in a sense, and have found that the encaustic technique, best known for its freeze-dry, opaque qualities, actually affords transparency. By carving into and re-filling a built-up surface, I am in theory at liberty to layer as many effects and images as I please.”
Through layering of specific yet competing imagery, Moffett’s work presents coincidental mergings and the distracted abstractions that result. “While selective about the imagery I use, chance and intention are in play. Although one may point to this or that meaning, such as the traditional use of skeletal imagery as a caution against vanity, the disparate representational elements are meant to support and distract from one another. There is no single meaning, but an urge to coax some hint of elegance from a variety of meanings and a confusion of means.”
