Transitions/Displacements

October 13-November 3, 2012
Opening reception Saturday, October 13, 6:30-8:30 pm
Artist in attendance
Main Gallery

At the core of Ledelle Moe's works are reflections on place. Over the past year, the artist traveled to various countries including India, Botswana, Cape Town and the Karoo, in South Africa. In each location she gathered sand and dirt and embedded the samplings of earth into her cement carvings.

For the artist, Transitions/Displacements references both a massive funerary statue as well as a memorial. While it is a monumental piece, it can move from site to site—displaced. This work is a way of marking space and place, but framed as something temporary, rather than permanent. The sculpture has weight and alludes to solidity and structure, yet is inherently modular and transient.

Though Moe's anthropomorphic figures evoke an undeniable human element evolving out of an age-old tradition of figurative sculpture, they are also distinctly structural. Composed of concrete and steel, they stand firmly rooted in the present, though concrete as a medium is equally an historical and industrial idiom. Her pieces explore paradoxes such as monumentality and fragility, permanence and impermanence.

Moe was born in Durban, South Africa in 1971. She completed her Master's degree in sculpture at the Virginia Commonwealth University and soon after accepted a position in the Sculpture department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Later she taught at the Corcoran College of Art in Washington, DC, Virginia Commonwealth University and St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Moe is currently based in Baltimore, Maryland but travels home annually to work in South Africa.