This Happened

THIS HAPPENED is 8 tableaux paintings, a storyboard spanning the last 5 centuries, regarding brutalities perpetrated by white people against black and brown people.

(1) The Sangoma and European tradesman, about 1500. Sangoma is a Zulu term for healer/diviner. Around 1500, the enslavement and subjugation of the peoples of Africa and the Americas got underway.

(2) 1600. The Sangoma has been felled. We whites did this.

(3) 1700. Uprootings, rapes, beatings, and terror are our modus operandi.

(4) About 1800. We do this through government and wars. Snakeballs occur in nature when snakes gather to mate. This image shows a governmental snakeball.

The white man's unmasked face transforms into an aura, a hallucinatory spectacle associated with migraines.

(5) BETWEEN 1800—1900, whites beat whites, and also non-whites. Racial animus remains unfinished business.

(6) About 1900. It is futile to be a midwife to this white man who is pregnant with his own death. But is this too early to call?

(7) Between 1950 and now, the white man loses his balance and falls.

(8) About 2020. This is happening. Is he still alive?! This isn't ending! S.O.S.! To whom do we send this message?

The gulf between what our eyes see and the images we are able to make is vast--maybe because of how hard we look away from what we see. And we don’t listen so well, either. As a doctor and an artist I have to hope that our acquired, willful deaf-blindness can be reversed. If together we see honestly, pay humble attention, and listen hard, then observation can combust into meaning, and meaning can point our way. Together, we are less lost. In the current struggle, who doesn’t want beauty and compassion to triumph?

Posted responses to THIS HAPPENED

Ieva Mediodia, painter, NYC

I saw it in her work. She has a good sense of color tones- they sound next to each other. Watercolor is not easy to handle, but she has great skill and a unique, luscious way to use this medium with saturated pigments; even earthy tones are vivid and lucid.

Intuition plays strong part in her painting--it feels free, painted with easy, confident gestures. Her painting reminds of automatic drawing and stream of consciousness process. I see a sensitive hand too--there are areas with beautiful details. But artists can't be contented to paint pleasing pictures; she addresses past and ongoing atrocities of white supremacy. This does not manifest as slogans, as political art often does, but what she achieves, I think, is great. And there is a feeling of love, regardless of the uneasy content. These paintings are painted with love- it is very obvious.

Carol Peckham, Hudson NY

At a recent opening at the RE Institute in Millerton NY, someone next to me described Sandra Moore's recent paintings succinctly: "Put on your seatbelts!" And the warning was accurate. To say she isn't easy is an understatement. In a cultural landscape of too many works that rely on gimmicks and visual shticks, hers stand out as visionary, disturbing, mysterious, and honest. Moore's current studies and paintings visualize the subjugation of indigenous people, brown tragic figures embroiled with white, almost spongy invaders. Their struggle is embedded in images of visceral pain, coils of gorgeous translucent snakes, shards of exploding color, and fabulous menacing cats. Moore says these are "political" paintings, but they go far deeper than facile polemics. Here is the Manichean struggle, chaotic and agonizing, that lays the foundation of all dark political times. Tough to look at but relevant, important.

Cindy Lubar Bishop, Dream-webbing, San Francisco

Recently I read Dreaming in Dark Times: Six Exercises in Political Thought by Sharon Sliwinski, professor at the University of Western Ontario. To me, what reviewer Kelly Bulkeley writes of Sliwinski’s work in the Huffington Post could as well be said of Sandy Moore’s paintings, so I will paraphrase his words (parentheses and italics mine), as applying thus:

"Sliwinski approaches dreaming (Moore approaches painting) as a powerful resource for political theory and action, especially in times when basic human freedoms are most at risk…throughout history, in times of collective crisis, people’s dreams (and artists’) have often responded with a surge of imagery, emotion, and insight that helps people respond more effectively and creatively to the pressing challenges facing their group in waking life. This is also true in the modern era, as Sliwinski’s fascinating and beautifully written book makes clear (and as Moore’s paintings make clear)." Moore’s decades of deep dives into art, science, medicine, psycho-social-political and mytho-poetic realities culminate in these evocative tableaux, at a time when deeper probing along such lines…is called for with the urgency of an S.O.S.

George Calmenson, educator, San Francisco

I have the sense that you are depicting your view of what’s under the skin of normal perception. Like you’ve peeled away a rectangle of the surface to expose what’s underneath, like seeing the viscera under the skin. The Images are dis-jointed, dis-membered, overlaid, fragmented, somewhat brutal. I think that the viewer being disturbed is the point of what you are painting. That’s part of what makes the paintings interesting to me, as the viewer I can’t do the usual figure-ground perception. Distortions of space and time and scale and continuity, and the clarity of line and intensity of color make that all very present and specific, “look at this, this is what I want you to see, and it’s not the world you think it is."