Woodblocks, Foucault's Pendulum

Joseph Moore

PUTTY'S CORONATION is pleased to announce the opening of Woodblocks, Foucault's Pendulum, a solo exhibition by Joseph Moore at Putty’s Coronation at 483 17th St, 4B, Brooklyn, NY 11215 from May 6th - August 20th, 2023.

In his solo debut at Putty’s Coronation, Joseph Moore presents Woodblocks, Foucault's Pendulum, a series of prints and video installation.

In 2014 Joseph Moore began making recordings of non-human animals using unsecured IP cameras, resulting in an ongoing series, titled The Inhabitants (2014-present). Using software that scrapes the web for unsecured IP cameras and grabs still images from each livestream, Moore has amassed an extensive atlas of security camera based images. Grainy, obtuse, and washed out, these images quietly record sites of domesticity, production, urban and natural environments. In this act of collecting, Moore’s archive has become a reflective amalgamation of mass surveillance and the super abundance of digital images. A super abundance documenting both public and private life, that at times, seems total and unblinking.

But, while surveillance cameras are often spoken about in the context of big government overreach and dystopian futures, Moore’s work takes a different approach, silently settling into the place of which these cameras are recording and allowing for a meditative comprehension of our external surroundings. In Woodblocks, Foucault’s Pendulum, Moore has chosen 13 images from his archive that carefully observe and record the seemingly imperceptible details of their location, giving attention to the most mundane and overlooked attributes. For Woodblocks Moore utilizes a CNC laser cutter to create detailed block prints of these images. The final result is a blend of the organic and mechanical, the woodgrain combining with the digital noise of the images themselves to create quiet moments of surveilled nothingness. In addition to Woodblocks, Moore presents a video from his series Foucault's Pendulum. In this work Moore alters recordings of Foucault’s pendulums, their frames rearranged according to the position of the pendulum rather than chronological time, creating a simultaneous appearance of continuity and fragmentation. Through both the prints and video installation, Moore explores ideas of disappearance and reemergence, of shifting visibilities, as well as the beauty found in the everyday.

Moore’s desire to see the unseen, to bear witness to something missed or in the state of being lost, is accompanied by a knowledge of limits, that is, that which is lost and can never be found. Resisting the notions of autonomy and completeness in favor of openness to multiple interpretations over time, Moore’s work offers a newfound poetic meaning to the seemingly banal observations these images distill over a set point in time. The final result is a thoughtful meditation on the fragility of our lives and the environments that make up the world around us.

Joseph Moore is an artist who lives and works in New York. His practice utilizes a variety of techniques and media, from chemical photography to computer networks. His work has been exhibited in venues such as The NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; Microscope Gallery, NY, NY; Arebyte, London, England; The New Museum, NY, NY; and is found in such collections as The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell. He received his B.F.A. from The Atlanta College of Art and his M.F.A. from Bennington College.