Laura Moore
Handheld

The multidisciplinary artworks in Handheld are rooted in Laura Moore’s fascination with obsolete technology and her commitment to repurposing materials. Having established a reputation for carving 1:1 scale vintage computer monitors and boom boxes out of stone, over the last few years her practice has expanded to include the making of quilts and mosaics. While the penchant for referencing obsolete consumer electronics remains central to her practice, this switch from smooth exteriors to the complexity of internal circuit boards has allowed the artist to expand her material and visual vocabulary. Culled from a personal collection of obsolete technology, she swaps the geometric patterns of the traditional quilt for that of a diagrammatic circuit board from a Nintendo game controller for instance. While the quilts elicit a degree of anxious comfort, the recent mosaics represent a further mash-up of past and present. Based on the guts of her collection of cell phones, each wall-mounted mosaic represents a circuit board enlarged to 1:12 scale. Suggesting archeological relics, thematically Moore’s work invites us to consider the preponderance and disposability of consumer electronics and the troubling inheritance these artifacts represent for future generations.