What is it that we see when we pause, looking a little closer at these borderland ecologies? Often our perception is limited by the resistance of prior perceptions -- world views that were shaped long before tenth grade biology. Our understanding of the world was given form in the mid 1700’s by two natural historians: Georges-Louis Laclerc, comte de Buffon, and Corelus Linneaus. Buffon’s published work, the monumental thirty-six volume Natural History, was a systematic attempt to catalog all flora and fauna. Meanwhile, Linneaus defined the natural world with hierarchical categories. Language became the precise instrument of knowledge: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Facts, once catalogued, recorded, represented, and defined, became truths.

The work of Marjorie Moore reminds us that this world, when we look a little closer or extend our observations carefully over time, remains indefinite, frayed at the edges. We enter this exhibit at the place where memory and desire merge with the tangible. Facts recede from view -- no longer are they comprehended as truths, yet still, they are not errors. What has been lost to the exactitude of science and its representations are the interconnected ecologies of meaning.

To be sure, in her collections of raw materials, curated and ordered on shelves, as in her completed works, Linneaus and Buffon remain vital, but somehow, changed, transformed in recollection. In her work, they combine with the toys and landscapes of childhood. Frogs, for example, seem to be drawn together into the following taxonomy: (a) those which are biological specimens, (b) hollow plastic toys once featured on television shows, (c) raw ones, (d) those which were photographed, (e) caricatures, (f) those drawn with a very fine brush, (g) those that are included in this classification, (h) others, (i) those which were found alongside a road, dead, (j) those that resemble a field at a distance. The specificity of science, conveyed in categories, spills through these landscapes of memory for the sake of what cannot be grasped.

The science of taxonomy and categorization serves only as a springboard -- a means to re-gather, reassess, and remember the ordinary nature of experience. In this act of recollection, Moore’s work is a renaming that marvels at memory’s melding of fragments drawn out of ordinary experience.

In each composition, which suggests a new taxonomy, new combinations are formed, and new relationships emerge. Between the preserved broken shells of newly hatched birds, and their fragile, decayed remains, so delicate and lace-like, something emerges and looks at us. What was living is now only a trace, transfixed and no longer alive. But the artificial looks back: a stuffed bird becomes animated. Its soul lies between the elegance and care of Moore’s work and our thought.

Perhaps she has generated a mechanism for discovery. Her work is not unlike the shelves and contents of her studio, though each is at a different stage of evolution. The shelves serve as an ordering system of sorts. The elements are shifted, rearranged -- presenting in their new combinations and compositions, proposals for what has yet to be named. Her completed work is likewise a vehicle for rethinking order and the time of experience. It calls to question the efficacy of language, recasting our perception of the ordinary world: persimmon, frog, bird, doll…

And, our world, through the lens that Moore has fabricated, takes on a slightly different character. It is as if, somehow, the juxtaposition of two things always suggests a third… as if, somehow, memory and desire are palpable, tangible layers that mediate between what is seen and what is thought.

We wander (wonder) in this interstitial landscape, finding that her work plays with time as it does with order. We are posited between the linear time of birth-to-death, and the cyclic time of pattern. We are drawn into the difference between variations of a persimmon fruit, each precisely drawn, and the leather-like bodies of dried persimmons. Universals, however, persist just beneath the surface: life and death pass through stages, commingling, each never separate from the other.

We understand her work as a sort of memory theater, or perhaps, a means of forgetting. The exhibit is like a museum, or a cabinet of wonder. Among the elements, Moore conjures a story, or multiple stories, overlapping. The fragments seem caught, in these narrative webs, between the named and the unnamed. Language has not ossified into fixed categories and seems tenuous, uncertain.