Emmett Moore’s Tempest (2023) is a meditation on form and metamorphosis. This stainless steel work is made from repurposed vintage car emblems, breathing new life into what would otherwise become dysfunctional objects. Measuring at 66″ tall, this large work begs the viewer to consider the impacts of industrial waste and how obsolete materials can potentially be transformed anew – a question ever-increasing in significance as humanity grapples with impacts of climate change and how they are exacerbated by industrialization.
Artist Statement
“I imagined an exhaust pipe tying itself into a not; a manifestation of my fascination with cars and increasingly conflicted feeling towards gas-powered machines. It becomes a fated snake eating its own tail, ultimately consuming itself, a mechanism rapidly becoming obsolete, and a tribute to an ending era.”
About Emmett Moore
Emmett Moore is a Miami-based artist and designer known for a technically rigorous interdisciplinary approach that challenges notions of functionality and fluctuates seamlessly between design and art examining our relationship with the built environment. Moore’s work utilizes processes taken primarily from architecture and industrial design, working with found forms of everyday objects to speak to the universality and timelessness of the utilitarian and quotidian. His material language consists primarily of secondhand goods and refuses to break down inherent hierarchies within the physical world and elevate the mundane. The content is based on personal history, nostalgia, and a collective past demystifying systems of value and removing authorship from form. Within this framework functional objects transcend their purpose and achieve an elevated role. His work has been shown institutionally at the RISD Museum, the Frost Art Museum, the Miami Art Museum, the Bass Museum of Art, and is in the permanent collection of the Perez Art Museum Miami. He was the first Miami-based designer to exhibit a solo exhibition at Design Miami/. Moore was named the Miami New Times’ Best Visual Artist in 2015 and 2021.
Special thanks to Amaral Custom Fabrications for fabrication and installation partnership.
