A piece written after attending Matt Morris’ opening at U-turn

Installation view, courtesy of the artist.

   These fragile objects have their own history where they’re found, cared for, broken, lost and found again.  if they didn’t clutter your childhood home, they do now.  All that’s left to imagine is the tiffany flatware cut from foam core. This capacity to create symbol, incite dream is stunning.  
   Like Beckett’s characters’ musings, perhaps only a broken-off suggestion can be tied to a truth and therefore moral in the artistic sense that mastery precedes morality and even grace, present by its lack, will forego pity.
   In fact, the glowing playing field is so level here, hierarchically nothing, that this frozen dance becomes a just-so performance. These cardboard ballerinas showed up like this, they wanted to, and like good dancers, they place themselves at the risk of falling. They’re already imperfect, broken.
   This show is a version, the narrative abstract enough to show just the tilt of the pieces’ shoulders with everything angled in relation to one another, all speaking to one another. This monochrome low-relief mumbling is in the service of greater expressiveness. This sequined torso is holding its’ breath.

- William Renschler

Matt Morris. Recipes During Wartime at the U-turn Art Space, Brighton district (Central Ave. between Kindel and Freeman), Cincinnati, OH.  Gallery hours Saturday 12-4 and by appointment. Through Feb. 27, 2010.


[William Renschler also wrote a belated perspective of Matt Morris' show at Renschler's Aisle Gallery location.  We offer it here as a link to this piece for those who especially enjoy Renschler's writings.]

Belated remarks, perhaps concerning Matt Morris’ opening

 [editor's note: it is generally not appropriate to have a gallerist review their own shows.  We make an exception to this belated posting, since it occurs after the show and also our delight in Renschler's cryptic and enlightening experience of a body of work.  This has been linked retroactively in February to Renschler's review of Morris' show at the Uturn Art Space.]
This is my body pentecostal, five pointed, dismembered, disjunct, re-membered and consumed like imaginary tea because the colors of the occasion are always just two and one is always shining.  The diamonds on the harlequin’s outfit, and scattered to be found transformed and wanting-- the imp(eror)’s serious clothes, and onstage everyone’s voices, undulating, carried like perfume, something one just touches to keep aloft.
   The harlequin, the figure that wears (shows) the new adopted-family structure. The ur-parents have vacated the upstairs halls, dancing.  It’s champagne in thimbles down here, other things sparkling, the perfect(ly) (usable) square is given you to play with: it’s a uniform (with lipstick from childhood.)  The teacher’s gaze is now a yellow threadbare trapezoid: vagabond.
   We begin in costume. Someone dresses us, then we dress ourselves. “Roast potatoes for” as Gertrude would say. Not a thing, a gesture. Non sequiturs that revivify and allow us to hear this just beginning: “they may be born Walter and become Hub, in such a way they are not like a noun. A noun has been the name of something for such a very long time.” *
   The “language” pinned in carefully-spaced waves in the form of smudged and drawn-upon tissues and their accompanying 21st century bric-a-brac is a foreign one, thereby creating what is nearly a purely aesthetic experience.  There seems to be no familiar and predetermined way to assimilate this. It’s a broken heart.
   Everything we may have thought to have left behind is now found here: the moon exacts the price of non-loss, that pale-green feathery light made for growing stems that bend from the weight of their own beauty. “For the place I really have got to get to is a place I must already be at now.”*

- William Renschler

Matt Morris, 'Paris Well With' at the Aisle Gallery, 424 Findlay Street 3rd Floor, Cincinnati, OH. Through Dec. 20.
Please also visit Dania Elliot's video interview of Matt Morris here.
In Photo: exhibition view courtesy of the artist.


* Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America.              

'Pairs Well With' at the Aisle Gallery

Video by Dania Eliot

Matt Morris, 'Paris Well With' at the Aisle Gallery, 424 Findlay Street 3rd Floor, Cincinnati, OH. Through Dec. 20.
There will be an artist talk from 1-3pm Saturday, November 21 on location in the Aisle Gallery.

Video Journalism: 'Brought to You By' at the U-turn Art Space

Video by Dania Eliot.

'Brought to You By' at the U-turn Art Space, 2159 Central Ave., Cincinnati OH 45214. Featuring work by Evan Commander, David Dillon, Tracy Johnson, Katie Labmeier, Elaine Lynch, Annette Monnier, Ellen Nagel, Rebecca Seeman, Suzanne Silver and Lindsey Whittle. Through October 31.