Thea Moeller at WONNERTH DEJACO / Vienna

Thea Moeller / Green Zebra and the Striped Roman

25 October – 02 December, 2023

WONNERTH DEJACO
Ballgasse 6, 1010 Vienna

 Images: courtesy of the artist and Wonnerth Dejaco. Photo: Peter Mochi



 

Immediately adjacent to the Monterey Street on-ramp to U.S. Route
101 in the city of San Luis Obispo, California, sits the remains of the
Milestone Mo-Tel (or Motel Inn), the world’s first “motor hotel.” The Mission
Revival complex provided lodging to drivers on the journey between Los Angeles
and San Francisco from 1925 to 1991. After years of disuse, most of the motel
was demolished in 2006. Today, one finds an extant three-tier belltower and the
typical stucco archways wrapping the refurbished but unused former office
space. A few steps away, along the perimeter of the original footprint, also
stands a section of wall, the aged façade of what once was the motel’s
restaurant. Cream-colored and measuring roughly five meters wide by one-story
tall, it is disconnected from any other part of the structure and supported
instead by five metal poles attached to wood braces. As one merges onto the
highway, they pass this curious fragment of early twentieth-century Southern
California vernacular—with its arch, a few terracotta roof tiles, a large
window, and a stylized belfry—just floating in an abandoned lot like the one
column left standing on the site of an ancient Greek temple.

 

Rather than being part of an official historic location, the wall has spent over a decade in its liminal state as an
isolated architectural snippet manipulated to stay on display as a kind of
structural excerpt. Most preservation projects in the United States invite
close consideration in some form—this property is fenced off and usually
glimpsed at 90 kilometers per hour. The wall does not preserve so much as
imply, and this prompts a different kind of viewing.

 

When I think of the work of artist Thea Moeller (since initially
becoming familiar in 2015), this edificial remnant is the first thing that
comes to mind. Moeller’s sculpture practice involves objects put into various
forms of tension or equilibrium, objects re-presented, objects only slightly
altered, and objects examined under changed circumstances from which they
originated, often in the space of a white-wall gallery. Seeing her art
inevitably involves asking how physical extracts are interacting with and
within a new context.

 

From the perspective of someone who teaches art history through
the lens of Los Angeles, there has been a tendency on my part to reach to
assemblage of the 1950s and 1960s for comparisons to Moeller’s process. The
gathering and repurposing inherent to her sculptural practice—sometimes for
immediate usage and other times saving for the right occasion—recalls for me
the stories of Betye Saar combing flea markets or Ed Kienholz visiting junk
yards, finding the items that would morph into the features of art to come. And
there were Angeleno artists at that time who also modified industrial materials
(akin to Moeller’s use of rubber, sheet metal, and steel) or made similar moves
as her between the scale of the gallery and that of other architectures, such
as Noah Purifoy. But assemblage work of that era was much further assembled
into configurations that transformed the elements. Moeller places
components—leaning them, pulling them, balancing them, reinstalling them, or,
at the most heavy-handed, fusing a limited number of connections between them
or applying lacquer—more so than constructing something. Hers
is a lighter-touch approach that suggests the possibility of some next step
that gallery goers are not yet privy to. That is not a suggestion that one day
all of her sculptures will amass into some mega piece, but rather that viewing
Moeller’s exhibitions involves absorbing the current situation and wondering if
this is the final state of these artworks. Analogous to the motel wall, one
imagines something to come as much as what is presented.

 

Back along the highway, there are other such instances when approaching
and passing roadside attractions. “World’s largest” whatevers dot desert
landscapes, drawing attention for their respective novelties but without any
particular relation to the next one after. Since the road is then an unedited
collection of short stories rather than a novel, one views each “must see” on
its own terms, especially over time. Multiple drives across Kansas or equally
flat expanses provoke pondering of “what ifs”. Could that huge ball of twine
finally roll away? What happens here if someone makes a more gigantic pistachio
elsewhere? But the attractions with simplicity in their gestures similar to
Moeller’s sculpture—positioning, suspension—raise the most questions. Ever
since the group Ant Farm took ten old Cadillacs and stuck them at an angle
nose-first in a field in Amarillo, Texas, the cars have acquired new paint jobs
and graffiti regularly, appearing changed with each new trip. When will one of
them finally tip over, or be washed away by flash flooding, or be stolen? While
Twin Arrows, Arizona, became abandoned, its two monumental, red-and-yellow
wooden arrows (each seven-and-a-half meters tall) stood perched as a landmark
the same as they had for decades. Then one of them finally fell over, as many
probably thought might happen eventually. Even still, looking today at the
widowed arrow hanging on with the other lying flat beside it, one wants to
speculate: Will someone put it back up? Will it sit there and just erode?

 

 

Text by Anthony Carfello