Alva Mooses received her BFA from The Cooper Union and MFA from Yale. Recent exhibitions include (Be)Longing (TSA, Brooklyn), Space Coiled Like A Serpent (LES Print Shop), You Enter Dancing/ There’s Always Sign (The Clemente Center), Cito, Longe, Tarde, (Haynes Project, Chicago), Se Entra Bailando (Socrates Sculpture Park), Buen Vivir (Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin), Retrato de un Paisaje (Museo Sívori, Buenos Aires), A Day’s Dust (Studio17, Stavanger, Norway), and Internalized Borders (John Jay College). She has completed residencies and fellowships at Greenwich House Pottery, The Center for Book Arts, The Lower East Side Print Shop, Socrates Sculpture Park, and The Clemente in NYC, The University of Chicago (Arts & Public Life) and Columbia College in Chicago, among others.
Alva has exhibited her work, curated exhibitions, and organized educational projects in the US and Latin America for over a decade. She is co-founder/director of LAZO, and serves on the editorial board for Latinx Spaces. Alva has taught Printmaking, Sculpture, and Drawing at The Cooper Union, Cornell University, and Parsons. She is currently an Associate Professor at Hunter College.
All that Light: Works Detail
13.
You Enter Dancing/ There’s Always Sign
Alva Mooses
2021
Handmade paper
14.
Ear to the Earth
Alva Mooses
2021
Ceramic
Curator’s Notes
Alva Mooses earned her MFA from Yale University and her BFA from The Cooper Union in painting and printmaking respectively. Both of those disciplines are on display in these works. Mooses says of her practice, "I create sculptures from geological materials such as volcanic stones, rammed earth, and cast concrete that make reference to lost or potential typographies and topographies, conveying strata of bodies in transformation. My work weaves together my personal and familial experiences of the U.S./Mexico border with cultural references and symbols."
Mooses describes the inspiration behind a recent body of work at https://www.mnbookarts.org/solastalgia-alva-mooses/
ARTIST ARTWORK DESCRIPTION FOR YOU ENTER DANCING/THERE’S ALWAYS SIGN:
The pieces are made with paper pulp casting methods and employ cement cast forms I was making over the past couple of years. The cement casts make reference to the shoe soles manipulated to disguise traces of footprints due to sign cutting, a tracking method employed by the US Border Patrol used to detect any disturbance of the environment left behind by humans, animals, or objects. The paper casts will be a series of paper sculptures to be abstractly considered as a book form and look to issues of human migration in relation to issues of climate crisis and border politics.
ON EAR TO THE EARTH:
Alva Mooses’ new ceramic sculptures navigate the collapse of an anthropocentric, climate-damaged world. Deflated terrestrial globes—objects that emerged with the onset of colonization to map, chart, and therefore conquer land and bodies of water—sink under their own weight, creating erogenous slits and openings in the process. Broken or no longer erect, the stands designed to uphold them become inoperative. Alva’s deconstructed globes undermine the project of western geography and the violence of its measuring tools, favoring instead a world, earth, planet governed by the erotics of its own materials. Out of these ruins of colonial domination, she composes a new syntax–sentences written with pieces of the shattered globe stands immersed in porcelain tablets. Between past disasters and ominous futures, Mooses creates sculptures inviting viewers to attune their senses to the very composition of the earth— its soil and minerals—rather than to its representation.
-Mirene Arsanios
ARTIST STATEMENT:
I am an artist and educator based in New York City. I create sculptures from geological materials such as volcanic stones, rammed earth, and cast concrete that make reference to lost or potential typographies and topographies, conveying strata of bodies in transformation. My work weaves together my personal and familial experiences of the U.S./Mexico border with cultural references and symbols. For examples, the Virgin San Juan de los Lagos is transformed into a volcano cast in silver, bringing into question the history of colonial interest in precious metals that drove the destruction of silver and gold in pre-Columbian artifacts – many of which were melted down into Catholic paraphernalia. In There’s Always Sign/You Enter Dancing, cement and paper cast forms of sandals represent objects one frequently encounters at the border such as shoes manipulated to disguise traces of footprints. Through my work, I reflect on notions of belonging and mestizaje in American society.