NIOMI "MOSS" FAWN
FLOURISH: Romancing the Mysteries
April 15–May 14, 2022
OPENING RECEPTION & PERFORMANCE
Friday, April 15, 5-7pm
ARTIST TALK
Saturday, April 23, 12pm
(April 2022) Niomi “Moss” Fawn’s debut solo exhibition at form & concept, FLOURISH, takes the form of a multi-piece altar in the gallery’s front corner. Unfolding across five weeks, with the Pagan celebration of Beltane, the pleasure season, at its center, FLOURISH is a landscape for sacred ritual and tender interaction. Lush natural motifs abound, visual and tactile pleasures swirl, and narratives of queer celebration bloom. Engage every week in special programs led by Moss and others, including an artist talk with Moss and Director Jordan Eddy on Saturday, April 23 at 12pm.
PROGRAM
Friday, April 15, 5-7pm: Invocation for the Flourishing
Saturday, April 23, 12pm: Artist Talk with Moss and Director Jordan Eddy
Saturday, April 30, 12-2pm: Beltane Invocation with Moss and Time Beings
Saturday, May 7, 12-2pm: Lyrical Offering
Saturday, May 14, 5-7pm: Gratitude Offering Closing Ceremony
Structured as a monthlong performance art residency, this immersive and ever-evolving show calls attention to fleeting moments of beauty through ritual reverence and ecstatic joy. “A devotion to joy in this time in history feels more than important—it’s both necessary, and it’s a choice,” Moss says. Informed by the boundless spectrums of gender and sexuality, the artist opens space for romantic transcendence. They wield their craft, prayer, memory, hopes and fascinations in service of rapturous, hyperreal beautification. “This installation is an invocation. I defy the lie that beauty is vapid, that joy is ignorance,” says Moss. “Life is the flourishing of presence, of compassion and imperfection.”
In our era of digital hyperdrive, Moss embraces the natural ebb and flow of life itself through a personal and yet ultimately universal lens: what beauty may unfold when our fidelity to beauty itself is treated as an artifact, a living thing and a personal beacon? “Moss is here to tell us that if hopelessness is the norm, then spreading joy is a radical act,” says Gallery Director Jordan Eddy. “That’s a philosophy—and practice—that Moss has honed for years, through ritual performance, visual art and spiritual studies. This is dreamy work, but it has a worldly impact made possible through Moss’s fidelity to nature and a lifetime of honing their artistry.”
Moss is a queer/gender installation and performance artist currently living in Santa Fe, NM. Predominantly self-taught practices in contemporary and traditional craft, ranging from woodwork to digital art and photography, inform their interest in hyperrealities, ritual performance, experiential spaces within 2D and 3D realms, immersive storytelling and boundary-blurring between viewer and artist, performer and audience. Their latest works involve the creation of objects and altars informed but not limited by classical concepts, which are placed in both natural and constructed environments, gradually transforming the surroundings and fuzzing the lines between real and hyperreal. Moss’s work has appeared in numerous institutions across New Mexico, including form & concept, Meow Wolf, No Land, Center for Contemporary Arts, Museum of Contemporary Native Art, 516 ARTS and New Mexico State University Art Museum. Past curatorial work includes Show Pony Gallery (2016-2020), Caldera Gallery and Iconik.
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For press or image inquiries, please contact Marissa Fassano at marissa@formandconcept.center.