Lydia Moyer is a contemporary video and print artist who works primarily with themes of feminism, the environment, and history. She often appropriates existing materials and objects and blurs the premise of non-fiction. Her work has been featured a number of national and international exhibitions. Aside from her artwork, Moyer also works as an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia.
After receiving her BFA, Moyer taught community documentary at Appalshop in Appalachian Kentucky. She began teaching at UVA in 2006. Moyer’s art is primarily video and print art. In an interview with Kiana Williams for Iris Magazine, a feminist magazine, at the University of Virginia, Moyer described her art making process as though it is her “job to distill personal experience or interest into something that other people can understand or from which they can get something, whether it be a feeling, an insight, a question, anything.” Moyer's art reinterprets and makes observations through a personal lens based on her own experiences. When asked about her motivation when making her pieces, Moyer said her “work often springs from my idealism and an attempt to reconcile that idealism with the world we live in. I’d be trying to reconcile those thing even if I wasn’t making art…In the most unromantic way, I think art is often about compulsion. The arts are too uncertain if one has to consciously seek motivation. If someone isn’t compelled to make things, I think they’d be smart not to abandon their interest in art but to find another way to make a living in order to be comfortable. That said, sometimes it takes a while to recognize these things, whether one is compelled or not. The influences and community around you can make a huge difference”
Art Work
Much of Moyer’s work deals with feminism, the environment, culture, and themes of erasure. Her video series The Forcing for instance, deals directly with themes of environmental degradation, climate change, and issues dealing with the objectification of women in the form of viral trends and videos. Deer, commonly associated with femininity, play a crucial role in many of Moyer’s pieces. In The Forcing two does are featured entering a house through a dog door while a sound file of a rambunctious crowd is played and clips of a vicious crowd of photographers are spliced in, allowing Moyer to address issues of objectification, social media, and environmental degradation. By splicing in clips of a large crowd of paparazzi pushing and shoving one another to take photos of the deer in the viral clip, a metaphor for women on the internet, she is able to convey the issues of objectification of women on the internet. These themes are repeated in several her published books like Deerstains, where deer are Photoshopped out of photos leaving obvious, and sometimes less obvious evidence of the deer that was previously in the photo. The absence of the deer, a metaphor for women, conveys Moyers analysis of the erasure of women, their accomplishments and even existence, throughout history and society today. As with many of Moyers pieces, the what is not present within the piece is what is important. Its obviousness of its absence and the void it left in an otherwise complete artwork, makes existence and its place in the piece more powerful. In another piece, Paradise, a feature-length film, Moyer investigates the relationship between culture and nature. In this piece, Moyer visits iconic locations where tragedies or disasters took place such as the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. The absence of people throughout the videos conveys the starkness of the landscapes which were once sensationalized, but now largely forgotten about. The goal of the piece is to encourage the view to experience the event again in a new light, while viewers without prior knowledge can create their own narratives. The piece plays with contrast in the relationship between the viewer and their preconceptions of a sensationalized tragedy as well as the relationship between evidence of human society in the natural landscape
