ERIN MORRISON: THE LETDOWN
OCTOBER 28 – DECEMBER 9, 2017
OPENING RECEPTION SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28, 6-9PM
Ochi Projects is pleased to present The Letdown by Los Angeles-based artist Erin Morrison. The exhibition is on view from October 28 – December 9, 2017 with an opening reception Saturday, October 28, 6-9pm.
The exhibition consists of reliefs made in complementary pairs, created by casting hydrocal surfaces in a monoprint process. With their marble-like facades Morrison’s reliefs suggest ancient artifacts such as Etruscan fresco or Puritan gravestone engraving. Referencing relics while using an industrial material alludes to the way artifacts are imitated if not outright looted — their original purpose and significance lost or misinterpreted. Through this process of dislocation, artifacts or replicas often take on a new kind of cultural significance where their possession and display is meant to indicate status and wealth.
Morrison is interested in the ways these objects that imitate artifacts become kitsch when a faux material meant to imply this sense of value fails to do so. Faux gold and silver, for instance, are often employed in this effort and feature predominantly in the exhibition. Morrison recalls a piece of jewelry she had in the 90s in two large panels depicting evil eye chains in gold and silver leaf. The evil eye, originally a talisman considered to have magical powers of protection, is depicted with broken links, revealing its artificiality, refuting its symbolic properties and transforming it into a cheap trinket.
Morrison further mines this moment of failed expectation. The Letdown, sharing their title with the exhibition, are two panels of milky-colored recurring wave pattern. The works are named after the physical reflux that occurs during breastfeeding; the letdown involves the release of oxytocin (the “cuddle” hormone) strengthening the bond of mother to child. The works recall a memory of simultaneously experiencing the letdown while breastfeeding her son, and feeling extreme despair watching Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign concession speech. In that bittersweet moment, Morrison felt a heightened awareness of injustice so profound that it called her to action, altering her sense of place and duty in the world. Turning the waves into guilded flames, Morrison carries this experience of complicated emotion into Ecstasy, two panels depicting gesturing hands. Though hands are a repeated trope in Morrison’s work here they specifically reference Alfonso Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Teresa conflated a great love of God with a pain “so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.” This conflation of the letdown and feeling let down, of waves of euphoria and waves of pain inform Morrison’s understanding of high and low, unmet expectation, false narrative, and the power of imagery and symbolic gesture.
Despite the cynicism required to grasp the concept of kitsch, Morrison nevertheless strives for a level of poetry in her pieces. In two final panels Morrison recreates a souvenir pendant that depicts a landscape. Morrison recognizes that while it may have sentimental value it is not a piece of fine jewelry. Interrogating and transforming the souvenir into an art object through her labor-intensive process, Morrison seeks a sincere means of making something well-crafted and whole.
