Albuquerque Journal Santa Fe/North Friday, September 23, 2011
CHALLENGING DOGMA
Morris reaches forward to unknowable destiny, backward to archetypal realms By MALIN WILSONPOWELL There is no substitute for encountering Kathleen Morris’s melancholic, sublime canvasses in person. For almost four decades, she has painted with the flawless technique of a 17th century European painter. Her mythic, openended, narratives are spun out of sacrifice, abundance, loss and desire –– the theme of this exhibition. Morris’s fullbodied figures swirl out of indeterminate, primordial background soup. The surfaces are distressed, clotted, and varnished. In this exhibition, there are two new additions to her “old master” manner –– embellishment with sheets of gold leaf and the application of cold wax to thicken the contours of a bird, a dog or a head. Morris’s paintings have notable weight in their lush, physical presence. In 1997, parishioners of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church were whipped into a heated protest of her oneperson exhibition in the santuario, during the period when the shrine was leased to the Guadalupe Historic Foundation (a group formed to save the 18th century building from the church’s 1970s decision to turn it into a parking lot). Ostensibly, the flap was about the nudity in Morris paintings, but Catholicism has given the world its greatest “Word made flesh” paintings. Ironically, Morris’s exhibition at the santuario was titled “Asylum,” and in the catalog she stated her intention to make available “compassion, respect for the mysteries of life, the pain and pleasure of being human, and an acknowledgement that we are all one.” No doubt the flap over Morris’s nude women was a convenient excuse in the demand that the
santuario be returned to the parish, but, in retrospect, this episode –– although painful for the artist –– was also a testimony to the power of her paintings. In many ways, the reactions were exactly right, for Morris’s paintings are a challenge to dogma. They are unsettling invitations into a psyche that is not entrained by doctrinaire JudeoChristian pieties. The stories she translates onto her canvasses look like links passed along from age to age; they seem to reach both forward to an unknowable destiny and backward to ancient, archetypal preChristian realms. They are laden with Greco Roman earthiness, like the Fayum portraits of Egypt. A Morris woman is never a modest, sorrowful virgin or martyr following orders and ashamed of her body, but a bare and naked woman negotiating her destiny through treacherous, twisting and shifting terrains of fate. Morris’s monumental canvasses are usually theatrical with full figures standing, riding, or suspended in enigmatic poses, in situations perpetually ripe for the psychoanalyst’s couch. “Ambrosia,” “Red Road” and “Spiritus Mundi” are relatively straightforward in their narratives. The couple in “Red Road” and the curled up baby in “Spiritus Mundi” have their eyes closed or averted. In contrast, the eyes of all three figures in “Ambrosia” –– the kneeling girlchild, along with the departing mother and the babe in arms astride a white horse –– pierce the surface of the painting to look directly into the eyes of the viewer. Morris’s faces often epitomize the rubric that eyes are the “window of the soul.” If you stand and look at these figures, you are included as a participant in the drama. The persona of this work taps into the nature of meeting and leaving; into the implications of witnessing, whether willing or not; into the
ambiguity, awkwardness and messiness of always operating with no clear path. These romantically eerie renderings are also disconcertingly becalmed. The theater of the other large canvas “Silent Spring” has a quite different feel and tone. It is a more operatic, ominous mystery tale. The most commanding section of the painting features a fleshcolored bird peering at the stage from a circular window. His elongated nose punctures the circular perimeter like an animated introductory Warner Brothers cartoon character in a cartouche. This puffycheeked, beady eyed bird holds a lens in its fully articulated human hands. On the stage is a lanky figure draped in a luxurious, trailing robe, whose back is turned. The standing figure has its left arm extended and head hunkered down, as if blinded and cautiously entering a blizzard of paint that is also a deafening cascade, where nothing ahead is discernible. There is something magnificent in Morris’s small, individual portraits heads. Like so much of her work, “To War No More” has an Italianate cast, and the adolescent face –– perhaps male, perhaps female, of an age for military recruitment –– looks out of its footsquare format, directly across the centuries. It is an eerie, affecting portrait that appears unfinished, like so many young lives lost to the follies of battle. It’s title is a perennial plea, and still sadly contemporary. The gawky young boy in “The Toy” is also laden with the ache and vulnerability of leaving childish things behind. He holds a crude doll to his heart and his pale torso seems to tremble against a starry night sky. As the boy lists and squints looking right, behind him on the left, the thick darkness is slashed with a red streak as bright as a fresh wound. Also of particular note in the exhibition is the cheery young man with pale
clown makeup titled “No Borders.” Over his head are a series of quickly sketched broadbrimmed hats (that could also be flying saucers) resembling the headgear of an itinerant medieval monk. Although he wears a dapper and fully realized beret on his head, the quickly drawn hat just might suit him better: Is his true nature that of a clown? A cleric? An artist? Maybe all three; maybe none. There is a riveting solidity and anguish in Morris’s diptych “Consumed,” with the right panel depicting a mature woman raising her arms to cover her ears with her hands as if one more sound, one more word, even the tiniest vibration was torture. On the left is a teensy figure walking a tightrope, with the rope turning into a trajectory, perhaps a spear, crossing from this panel to penetrate the panel of the woman in pain. Although Morris operates in mythic territory it is the specifics of her stories on canvas that grip our imaginations.
If you go
WHAT: KATHLEEN MORRIS: “Desire” WHERE: Box Gallery, 1611A Paseo de Peralta, Railyard Arts District, Santa Fe WHEN: Through Oct. 15. HOURS: 10 a.m. 5 p.m. daily. CONTACT: 505.989.4897 or info@boxgallerysf.com
Art Issues column MALIN WILSON POWELL For the Journal Albuquerque Journal NORTH Section