Jennifer Samet interviews painter Carrie Moyer whose exhibition Sirens is on view at DC Moore Gallery, New York through Mar 26, 2016.

Moyer comments: "What is political about my painting, if we can even say that, is that it is experiential. They are abstractions based on my own history, even though they address the history of 20th-century painting, or at least certain parts of it. I’m also positing ideas about pleasure — both pleasure for me, and pleasure for the viewer. This feels decadent right now, because it is not about the work being a commodity, it’s about the pleasurable experience of looking. Hopefully the paintings operate at degrees, meaning people who aren’t involved with the history of painting can get something out of it. I’m not interested in intellectual opacity or 'enlightening' the viewer. I’m going for beauty, seduction, and play — a physical experience, an optical experience. However, my first audience, the one I’m thinking about in the studio, is always other painters and people involved in the history of painting. What dialogue am I in with painters from the past? I think about painting in terms of the politics of who is making it, and when it gets made. For instance, isn’t it interesting that we are living in this moment when there are a lot of prominent women abstract painters? This is very unusual."