August 2007     FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Marina Moevs: Paintings 
September 8, 2007–October 27, 2007
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 8, 6:00-8:00 p.m.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Friday: 10:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m., Saturday: 11:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

Koplin Del Rio is pleased to present an exhibition of new oil paintings by Marina Moevs. In these invented, imaginary landscapes and interiors, the artist continues to use the language and tradition of landscape painting for metaphorical ends.

The paintings explore the dramatic and frightening process of losing an identity while another identity surfaces amidst the ruins. They track the transition from the familiar but culturally prescribed and socially constructed self, to the foreign experience of the expansive, comprehensive self. Like a house caught in a natural disaster, the familiar self gives way. Only then does a new self-understanding emerge.
The narrative theme of a natural disaster is evident in most of the paintings. Fire, flood, hurricane and tornado wreak havoc on human habitations. The natural disasters are in full force or are implied by the type of destruction they leave behind. Yet the paintings are eerily still and calm.

Through their sheer scale and their cataclysmic impact, the dramatic personal trials that occur when the familiar self splinters and gives way, mirror natural disasters. The tectonic shift from the familiar self to a new self-understanding, like a natural disaster, presents formidable challenges that must be addressed not only on a practical level, but also psychologically and metaphysically. Yet the transition to a new self-understanding is accompanied by a deep stillness.

In “Ocean IV” a house has been dragged out into the ocean, presumably by a long since departed hurricane. The ocean, an ancient mystical symbol, is calm and the weather is brilliant, as it often is after a hurricane. In “Fog III”, the vestiges of a natural disaster have vanished and all that remains is the ocean, blurred by a heavy fog into an almost indistinguishable oneness with the sky.

Marina Moevs lives and works in Los Angeles. She earned her B.A. from Mt. Holyoke College. After studies and residency in Paris she returned to the United States to complete her MFA at Brooklyn College in New York. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows on both the East and West coasts. This is her third exhibition with Koplin Del Rio.