Aris Moore

Aris Moore creates subtly strange pencil portraits of men, women, and children that reorganize the composition of the face in unexpected ways. With sometimes bloated, stretched, or sagging faces, Moore brings her subjects’ haunting interior lives to the surface of her work. She often punctuates her drawings with flashes of color, and ultimately, Moore deals in the art of exaggeration, with discomforting but wholly original effects.

In some instances, Moore's work attains its strangeness from absence, as Moore builds up her portraits with outsize or lacking elements. Missing necks, eyebrows, or cheekbones, the people in her pictures appear slightly off, though carefully rendered. In her Anonymous Men series, for example, Moore creates detailed portraits of sharply dressed men, albeit with their faces empty but for a blur of white. Moore’s work often attains its strange, distorted look by use of composites or collage, as seemingly normal features come together to create entirely alien faces. In another series, Moore blends the faces of couples together into a singular portrait with ghostly undertones. 

Moore has had exhibitions in the Netherlands, New York, and Boston.