0₂art3: Paul Morrison, gamodeme

The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu
On view beginning May 26, 2006

The Contemporary Museum's artist project series, O₂art, continues in 2006 with British artist Paul Morrison, who has gained wide international recognition for his films and bold, graphic black and white landscape paintings.

Morrison draws on imagery of the natural world from sources in popular culture, fine art, film and science to transform familiar images of nature into something uncanny and altogether unnatural. Hence nearly all of his images – their scale, color (or lack thereof), flatness, and slick fabricated appearances, are at odds with their counterparts in nature. Typically installed indoors, Morrison's work provokes a profound sense of self-awareness by upending every aspect of human scale while conflating natural environments with those that are man-made. For The Contemporary Museum, Morrison designed a temporary wall outside the building along TCM's Barbara Twigg-Smith Honl Terrace and Reflecting Pool to support a monumental black and white painting titled gamodeme. The scientific term gamodeme, derived from the Greek deme – a unit of subdivision in ancient Attica, refers to an isolated community of intrabreeding organisms (or deem) of the same kind or species.

Jutting from TCM's façade, the monumentally-scaled wall interrupts the architectural footprint of the museum's building while the stark black and white painting forces engagement with its floricultural setting. The painting features stylized flower forms through which is glimpsed the image of a two-story half-timbered house or Fachwerkhaus referring to Albrecht Durer's c. 1498 engraving Madonna, Christ Child, and Monkey. Happening upon the curiously out-of-place image of the medieval house, museum visitors may call into question their relationship to the natural environment around them. By introducing a dissonant chord within the overwhelming beauty of the site, Morrison underscores TCM's beautiful but unnatural (man-made) garden setting. This jarring adjacency interrupts the garden's quietude and forces an experience that is empirical and comparative as well as one that is internalized and romantic. Morrison's painting underscores the garden's artifice while revealing it to be a monumental work of art in and of itself.

MAHALO
O₂art3: Paul Morrison, gamodeme has been organized by Michael Rooks, Curator, The Contemporary Museum and is generously underwritten by Schaefer Design Hawaii, with additional in-kind services provided by ResortQuest Hawaii, formerly Aston Hotels and Resorts.