Gabriella Moreno

Rhythm is magnetic. Pieces never move through space independently. Their weight, speed, and direction create chaos, and within that, patterns of convergence. This magnetic dynamism happens without awareness, unruly and always present. Gabriella Moreno’s practice is one of movement, reaching and digging for the spaces where bodies attract and repulse.Lacer is a site-responsive installation that activates Atlanta Contemporary’s lobby as a space of tantalization and physical strain. Playfully welcoming visitors and bringing awareness to their position-inside or outside-as a greet. The front windows, modified with translucent red vinyl prints, show distinct abstract images created by inking and hand pressing a leather bondage hood onto paper. The forms are mysterious and obscure, but legibility comes through their direct leather textures, crisp hardware impressions, and flirtatious peep holes in the paper. The images engage the leather bondage hood not as a monolithic, graphic cultural object, but as something more intimate–a used skin, charged and disheveled from a body’s touch.Accompanying the prints are two stainless steel forms hanging from ceiling to floor. Originating from contour drawing arrangements where the artist connects vintage professional dominatrix magazines together, ropes, chains, whips and bodies form a sequence, creating “playlines” that move from page to page and form a solid shape. 

A sprawling rubber strip ties the “playlines” into one. Tangled and unruly, they criss-cross between the poles to create visual tension against the steel’s sleek order. The movement of the intersecting rubber lines also mimics the tight lacing of a leather hood or a corset back, pooling on the floor as bedraggled residuum.Lacer prompts a reframing of our collective understanding of violence and intimacy—as entities that are not necessarily diametrically opposed, but in fact have a complex and extensive relationship.