Lydia Moyer

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 including The European Media Arts Festival in Osnabruck, Germany; The Impakt Festival in Utrecht, the Netherlands; video-dumbo in Brooklyn; the PDX Festival in Portland, Oregon; the Black Maria Festival in Jersey City; Printed Matter in New York City and the Center for Book and Paper at Columbia College in Chicago. Aside from her artwork, Moyer also works as an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia.

Moyer received her BFA at the New York State School of Art and Design at Alfred in 1999. In 2005, Moyer received her MFA in studio practice at UNC Chapel Hill.

After receiving her BFA, Moyer taught community documentary at Appalshop in Appalachian Kentucky. She later began teaching at UVA in 2006 after completing her MFA at UNC Chapel Hill.

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 descried 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.” Her art reinterprets and makes observations through a personal lens based on her own experiences. When asked about her motivation when making her pieces in Iris Magazine interview, 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”

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.

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