Ron Lambert and Christopher Moss

Gist, July-August 2014 

Grizzly Grizzly is excited to announce ‘Gist,’ a two-person exhibition of sculpture from Ron Lambert and painting from Christopher Moss for July 2014.  The show’s title is borrowed from Gestalt Theory’s concept of ‘gist memory,’ in which objects are perceived by their overall pattern or essence.  For this exhibition, both artists present work that is best understood as something other than the sum of their parts.

Ron Lambert’s sculptures combine building materials and domestic objects enveloped and interrupted by amorphous, organic forms.  His work addresses our cultural aims to build towards perfection, while understanding the futility of such an effort.  In following the detours made in commitment to a failing idea, Ron states: “We start putting patches on patches and after a while the process is more about the attempts to repair than the original goal.  In the end it might be the patches are more beautiful than the goal of the original plan.”

Christopher Moss presents 15 paintings, arranged in a grid with one space left empty.  Each painting’s two-word title draws from a list of the 10,000 worst passwords combined with words tracked by the NSA across social media platforms.  Individually, the paintings are visceral and unique, comprised of globby, colorful paint, mixed-media assemblage, and sometimes crude, cartoony depictions of paranoid faces. When viewed together, a cryptic logic emerges from the paintings’ uniformed anxiety.

Artist Bios

Ron Lambert received his MFA from the School of Art and Design at Alfred University, and his BFA from the University of Connecticut.  Ron is currently an assistant professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. His work has been published in Shaping Space, Third Edition, and Color, Third Edition, both by Paul Zelanski as well as the show catalogue People Doing Strange Things With Electricity. Ron has shown in galleries nationally, including the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Michigan, the Attleboro Arts Museum in Massachusetts, the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle, the Housatonic Museum of Art in Connecticut, the Frist Art Center in Nashville and several college and university galleries around the country. His videos have been screened internationally in Hungary, Ireland, Brazil, Serbia, Romania and as part of the Sanluan Yishu project in Beijing, China. His work is in the Vascovitz collection, the Swedish Medical Center, and the collection of the Tacoma Art Museum. Ron is a founding member of the COOP collective in Nashville TN.

Christopher Moss was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and grew up in rural northeastern Pennsylvania. He received his MFA from CUNY Brooklyn College in 2006. He lives and works in New York. His work is represented by Theodore:Art, New York.

All installation photographs courtesy of Jaime Alvarez