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| Art Perry Breathings: Joey Morgan UBC Fine Arts Gallery, Vancouver, January 2-27 1979 Vanguard, Vol. 8 #2, March 1979. [ 871 words ] Joey Morgan's recent exhibition Breathings evolves out of her interest in unaesthetic materials. There is nothing pretty or cleanly classical in Morgan's first Vancouver exhibition at UBC's Fine Arts Gallery. For Morgan, art is a process of evocative sensations meant to disrupt rather than to pacify the viewer's perception. Following this, Morgan has produced a series of conglomerate sculptures that bombard the viewer with an unrelenting barrage of small images, all harboured in the untantalizing ooze of lumpy plaster lathered in musty-coloured varathane, wood stain, house paint, Rhoplex, glue and a host of indefinable substances. Throughout the seventies a major sculptural development has been this use of disturbance materials. Robert Morris can be viewed as its initial protagonist in the late 60s. A gallery space became Morris's open forum for unlimited material expression — massive heaps of industrial felt, rubber, cotton waste, mirrors, dirt, trees and assorted pieces of scrap metal were liberated vehicles for sculptural invention. Since that time a large number of artists have advanced the use of disturbance materials into an undeniable and substantial part of contemporary sculpture. Walter De Maria filled the Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich with 1,680 cubic feet of 'pure' dirt (a process De Maria repeated recently in Friedrich's new Soho Gallery). Eva Hesse, a standout in the Leo Castelli warehouse exhibition organized by Robert Morris in 1968, stretched our material tolerance by presenting sheets of yellowing latex and smeared fibreglass into mainstream sculpture. Joey Morgan owes much to such developments and especially to Eva Hesse. Yet Morgan should not be viewed as a shallow slipstream opportunist. More correctly she understands the Hesse statement, and is producing contemporary art in an animated and important manner that has a firm base in an evolving modern tradition: the tradition of disturbance materials. Trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and at the Rhode Island School of Design, Morgan has until this exhibition been unresolved in her approach to art. Since moving to Vancouver in 1974, her art has been expressed in such endeavours as a handbook on fish for the government's Salmon Enhancement Program, and a series of illustrations on the Beaufort Sea. Over the past year Morgan has worked on Breathings in her Empire Building studio. Undoubtedly her direction will change and Morgan will now leave the salmon in the Beaufort Sea and confront the currents of mainstream Canadian modernism. For an initial exhibit Joey Morgan's Breathings is astounding. Unable to edit a show from years of past production, the complete Empire Building oeuvre is surprisingly strong and unfaltering. The overall feeling of the show is one of rich residue. Pockets of shiny plaster are filled with haphazard collections of flotsam and jetsam. Throughout the exhibit there is a sense of water, of sea or tidal movement, of aquatic disorganization. It's a strange balance between magic and mayhem that leads the viewer from sensuality to repulsion. The Gallery's north wall holds the two strongest works in the exhibition. Untitled, as are all Morgan's pieces, these two wall-structures are built on the time-tested security of stretched canvas. Yet as Morgan builds her world of bottom drawer elegance the canvas becomes a slipping surface of running liquids and oozing fluids hardened and suspended in time. The wall-structure on the left has a lower shelf or rectangular tidal pool that catches a bulk of plaster and assorted objects as they gravitate off the bottom of the canvas. Bits of mirror, plastic tubes, beads, gold stars, torn maps, all flush together into the shelf. For the viewer Morgan's works are momentary stoppages in time. We know that these are infinite images, and their slipping process is only part of a much longer process — in fact Morgan has included a rather conspicuous Muybridge photo-sequence to enforce that point. It all helps to make each passage of Morgan's structures an element of continuing discovery for the viewer's imagination. The other north wall work is again a slipping piece. Yet this time it is a hinged window that collects the goop as it falls downward. Studding the mass of gleaming ooze are strings of clear lights that shine in defiance of the work's inherent ugliness. Similar to the gold stars in the first wall structure, these lights, by contrast, add a note of humour. In some of her other works Morgan utilizes this same contrast theme. One hanging piece incorporates bits of lace that are played off uncoiled metal springs and lengths of plastic tubing — elegance and function, design for pleasure, design for purpose — Morgan knows the precise equation for her conglomerate images. Joey Morgan's Breathings is the affirmation of a successful statement by a young and unquestionably gifted sculptor. As the title suggests, this is a show of give and take, of exhaling and inhaling, that allows both Morgan and her audience to experience new 'breathings' from her art. Showing her originality through the tested format of disturbance materials, Morgan has both assurance and a sense of place in her first Vancouver exhibition. Vanguard, Vol. 8 #2, March 1979 Text: © Art Perry. All rights reserved.
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