Description
2023. Archival inkjet print, Hanemulhe photorag, metallic silver and signed on the verso.
8.5 x 14 in.
‘Four Letter Words’ is a series born from the 2016 presidential election as an homage to Gayer’s grandfather who used that expression loosely and liberally throughout her childhood. Taking a page from his sense of humor yet feeling the drive to be unambiguously political, this series refocused three different preoccupations already present in her work; a concern with how patterns function, especially the convoluted ways they are gendered, with the notion of non-mediated communication via color and in language. During the first volley of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly with the immediate shock of confinement, the color drained out of the words. They physically shrunk to a series of drawings in 5” x 7” notebooks executed in the tool closest to her hand, a black marker. These drawings riffed on whatever words stood out that day in the media or on the block. Since then, these drawings have served as the seeds of new projects, cross-pollinated in wide-ranging materials and scales. Yet the deepest desire pervading all these works is a comingling of where the political and conceptual underpinning only serve to enrich the aesthetic devotion hopefully worthy of finding someone who will love them enough to hang on their wall.
Tamara Gayer was born in NYC and grew up in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Gayer holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in combined media from Hunter College. She is a founding member of the Hint House one of New York’s longest-running artist/musician collectives. In New York, her work has been shown at Foxy Production, Exit Art, and Smack Mellon among others. She is represented in several prominent collections including the Museum of Modern Art where she has lectured on her work. In her quest to bring art as close as possible to the public, she has emphasized showing at a broad range of cultural institutions, non-art venues, and festivals. In recent years these include the Macedonian Art Foundation, Smart Spaces, Fourth Street Art Block Festival, Way Home, and Artscape/Young Place. In recent years she has completed several significant commissions including for the Penn State Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity and most recently a cycle of murals on the basketball courts of Williamsburg Houses in Brooklyn.
