Morgan O'Hara: Live Transmission
New York based artist Morgan O'Hara could be known as a time writer. Both "Live Transmission" and "Time Studies" series keep on the artist’s own exploration and attention toward the essence of lives, and develop into long-term projects that have been practicing for decades.
Working for more than thirty years, O’Hara’s "Live Transmission" series records the movement – the initial sign of lives – in a way other than text, sound, image, or video. All the light, the sound and the event compress onto paper, a two-dimensional surface, based on an axis of time then grow into a four-dimensional space that continuously creates parties of experiences. Pencils holding in hands, eyes focusing sharply on objects, arms wandering softly on paper, O’Hara makes records of changing, and the sparse or tense lines become the existence of her interpreting. In fact, Time-Based Art may only be just one of characteristics in her works without consciousness. Everything happened in the one-way flowing time is extremely important because they are irreversible and cannot be replicated. However, O’Hara narratives the movement on paper in a way that breaks restrictions, and expresses the time in an abstract tone. Also, it is worth mentioning that the intention based on time actually reaches the characteristic of “Timelessness” after the end of the behaviors and the works.
LIVE TRANSMISSION: movement of the hands of AOMORI CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTRE staff during office hours 4:00- 5:30 pm, Aomori, Japan,2001.08.20
27.9x42cm / 11.75 x 16inches / graphite on paper
When it comes to lives, “Time Studies” series should be the most initial question that O’Hara asked about. The artist chooses the second-hand paper left in the history as a base, then paints or writes her use of time in on it, overlapping texts and symbols in different time and space and beginning a dialogue that collapses the order of tim. The works that will be in the exhibition are created in MacDowell Colony in 2009, recording 55 days (1,320 hours) of residency life of the artist herself on an accounting book of a tailor in 1792 to 1794. The walnut traces written by feathers talked with the bright colored blocks of time arrangement, starting a disorder conversation that continuously speaking.
LIVE TRANSMISSION: movement of camera, light and sound technician BEN BRIAND / film director MEGAN COOK / and design students relating their experiences of working on the costume and prop design for the SYDNEY OLYMPICS / College of Fine Arts New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2001.09.20 29.7 x 30 cm / 11.75 x 16.5 inches / graphite on paper
It is her unique dedication to movement of lives that makes "daily life" become the core of O’Hara’s works. Vendors bustling in fish markets in Japan, nurses delivering babies in Italian hospital, or her own usage of time, all turn into the objects she wants to observe and record. The attitude regarding daily behaviors as an artistic extension, in fact, coincides with the idea “Art is presented life.” of Performance Art. This could be viewed as the artist's cultural inquiry after entering an exotic field, responding to herself-need and the contemporary social issues by means of the reconsideration and the reinterpretation of daily elements
