Moe Gram - "The Play Pen Has Soft Brick Walls"

Hi, my name is Moe Gram. “The Playpen has Soft Brick Walls” is an installation and large-scale collage using found objects from a much larger series and body of work titled "How to Earn Your Big Girl Panties." This body of work was developed during a residency in the South of France through the La Napoule Art Foundation. I continued to work on this piece and also the rest of the body of work through the Friend of a Friend Gallery 5 to 9 Residency here in Denver, Colorado. The "How to Earn Your Big Girl Panties" series is about the process of how a woman finds a great deal of value in who she is as a person and what she has to offer to the world.

This piece starts with the main focus area being the main box spring. I used a box spring mattress because it embodied the size of a twin bed. I think that there's a juvenile quality to the twin mattress and as we grow older we sort of grow out of this twin bed. I wanted to sort of show or represent this emerging from this very youthful place as an 18-year-old woman. I wanted to represent the process of 18 to 21-year-old young girls trying on adulthood. In the twin bed you'll notice there are these 2 mannequin heads that are sort of emerging from this twin bed and super juvenile items surround them. There's a backpack with a My Little Pony and a unicorn play toy and a wide range of materials that simply just nod at this very youthful experience. There is also sort of this cautionary element that includes reflectors that are typically used at the end of driveways for cars or to be mindful of when driving. 

Viewers are able to walk in and around this deconstructed playpen. When we think of playpens as babies, they are meant to keep us all safe; they are meant to be an object that protects children and gives children space to play and sleep with these really nice restraints. Once you deconstruct the playpen and make it open, then it no longer has that protective element. Thinking about brick walls, as we grow into adulthood, there's room to reconcile there's room to grow. Younger adults have the space and time to make mistakes.  Maybe they are a little self-destructive or lean on their assumptions of what being an adult is, because there is time. There's time to grow on beyond that moment and there's also not a lot of risks involved most young adults don't have a lot to lose right and so I've deconstructed this play pin to 2 almost sculptural pieces of work the work that now references the responsibilities that come with young adulthood. You'll notice things like an iron sitting on top of a laptop and you'll notice the sort of hygienic pieces, sanitary napkins and a toothbrush, and a loofah that has been completely ripped apart.   There are also references to the ways that we learn, grow, and evolve like getting our 1st parking ticket or our 1st letter from the tax revenue service or the Treasury department. There are just all of these different elements that sort of go back-and-forth between being very very youthful and juvenile. 

This work also references the things that come with early adulthood. I've used stretched lingerie to be sort of this nod at what many young feminine beings experience when they're wanting to be sexy for the 1st time in their life. They aren't little girls anymore. Other references like broken nail polish bottles and recreational opportunities that we see a lot of humans in their early twenties experiencing. So this deconstructed playpen you'll notice has a brick wallpaper but it's very soft. When we think about brick walls and how tough they can be in reality or when they're more of a metaphorical brick wall, we learn that those guards are not nearly as strong as we would anticipate. Especially as young adults and so this idea of a playpen being made of soft brick walls is a much greater metaphor for these times of life where we're really just expanding our horizons and aiming to live beyond our perspective of Ourselves.