Lousy Brims: A Detroit Project
Lousy Brims: A Detroit Project, created by Robert Moeller, is an aggressive and rough-hewn act of remote portraiture that attempts to depict and map the ongoing cultural, economic and political struggles of a city in transition. Using text, appropriation, painting and agitprop, the project tries to depict the metrics of both failure and recovery. This non-linear accounting fills an adjacent space to actual experience using a variety of strategies to act as placeholders for the constantly unwinding history of Detroit. The depiction of actual events, coupled with signage and a larger field of visual data, parses information out in sections and act as the armature that holds the work together.
Concurrently, this work explores the destabilizing role the contemporary art world plays as it migrates into Detroit, drawn by absurdly low real estate prices and the ongoing desire to impose itself atop a once thriving cultural center. Ephemeral vignettes offer brief, untidy glimpses into both the actual and fictional lives of people as they intersect with a very unique kind of metropolitan despair, dysfunction, and city-rot that defines any recounting of Detroit’s recent and ongoing hard- ships. The project, which features over 100 pieces of work, isn’t a visual document based on personal experience but rather a compendium of actual and imagined moments, distilled from afar, that attempts to render a portrait of a very real, yet unvisited place. Part artwork, part social and cultural critique, Lousy Brims: A Detroit Project is a narrative act of protest and visual reportage.
Robert Moeller is an artist, writer, and independent curator. His work has been exhibited widely and his writing has appeared in numerous publications including Hyperallergic, Art New England, AfterImage, and Big Red and Shiny. The Boston Globe cited “A Woman’s Arms” which he curated, at Lincoln Arts Project in 2014 as one of the notable exhibitions of the year. More recently, he has curated “Yeah, You Missed It” at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts in Boston and “Shake/Not Here” at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly MA. The two latter exhibitions, which are part of an ongoing pop-up series, together have featured the work of more than 50 emerging and established artists. This is his first exhibition at Gallery Kayafas.