Weekend Plans: A solo exhibition by Kristin Moore

Square One Gallery is pleased to present Weekend Plans, Kristin Moore’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. Beneath vast skies and the last light of day, roadside signs and recognizable storefronts come into view: Blockbuster at dusk, McDonald’s beneath a crescent moon, or the red roof of Pizza Hut against an uninterrupted blue. Each appears suspended in a moment of cinematic stillness, like a scene held after the figures have left the frame but before the story has fully moved on.

Throughout the exhibition, Moore returns to destinations that once gave shape to the rituals of growing up, from choosing a movie with friends to stopping for donuts early in the morning. Once fixtures of the American roadside, these storefronts and signs became part of the visual language of Americana, recognizable across cities, suburbs, and small towns. Moore approaches them not simply as commercial spaces, but as landmarks through which time, place, and memory become inseparable. We grow older, the landscape changes, and some of these places disappear entirely, yet their imagery remains remarkably intact. 

Moore is known for painting architectural landscapes through an atmospheric and cinematic lens, drawing from an extensive archive of photographs gathered during road trips, flights, and travels across the country. Film informs her sensitivity to framing, color, and implied narrative, with particular inspiration found in the cinematography of John Alcott, Hoyte van Hoytema, and Wes Anderson. Her photographs offer the first outline of a composition, but the image shifts as she paints. Details fall away, buildings become distilled, and open fields of sky alter the pace of the scene until the original setting gives way to something more elusive: not the place exactly as it was, but the way it continues to exist in memory.

“These seemingly ordinary experiences connect us through a shared language of brand nostalgia and American culture.”
— Kristin Moore

Within Weekend Plans, nostalgia is carried as much by atmosphere as it is by iconography. Moore’s precise buildings and glowing signs occupy only a fraction of each canvas, leaving broad expanses of sky to establish the hour, mood, and passage of time. What once appeared ordinary is seen again with the distance of adulthood, illuminated by the knowledge that certain routines, places, and versions of ourselves cannot be revisited in quite the same way. The paintings preserve no single memory exactly; instead, they capture the enduring pull of an American landscape that belonged to countless lives, yet somehow felt entirely our own.