“The Letdown, sharing its title with the exhibition, are two panels of milky-colored recurring wave patterns. 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 between mother and 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 this moment the artist recalls a ‘heightened awareness of injustice so profound that it called me to action, altering my sense of place and duty in the world.’

Turning the waves into gilded flames in another work titled Ecstasy, she carries this complicated experience into the gesture of a hand. Though hands are a repeated trope in her work, here they specifically reference Alfonso Bernini’s masterwork, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Teresa conflated a great love of God with 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.’

Morrison’s conflation of the letdown and feeling let down; waves of euphoria and waves of pain inform the artists’ understanding of high and low, unmet expectation, false narrative, and the power of imagery and symbolic gesture.”

-Pauli Ochi for The Letdown Ochi Projects, Los Angeles 2017