Works by Morison

Press, 9 December 1988, Page 16

Works by Morison

Art review

“Four Works. 1985-1986” by Julia Morison at the McDougall Art Annex, Arts Centre, until December 18. Reviewed by Pat Unger.

Julia Morison’s recent large and controversial works are on exhibition for the first time in the South Island at the McDougall Art Annex. This 1988 Frances Hodgkins Fellow impresses and puzzles with the emblematical and often inexplicable content of her paintings and constructs. Her preoccupation with philosophy is expressed in ideas that are heavy with coded meaning, paradoxes and ambiguities. Her art techniques are skilful. They add stern and plausible beauty to these intense, abstruse works that appear to examine a perceived devaluation in modern life.

Morison uses key words and images to retrieve symbols and thoughts from our collective pool of beliefs — and memories — and presents them as idols and fetishes, along with their associated emotions of wonder, fear and contempt. These feelings may then be attached to objects or be left as free-floating sensations to be loaded on to other neutral ideas and symbols at a flick of the artist’s prod.

Taking from mythology (particularly the Egyptian god, Hermes, of magic and alchemy fame, whom she gives a dog’s head, borrowed from the Greek Hermes), from Jewish writings about Golem (which told of secret formulas to turn clay into “an embryo of Adam”) and from iconology (theories about imagery) this artist creates, in tabled style, science-like fantasies. “Dog Deifier, Reified God” two hanging panels in black and gold, is a contrast of “dog,” elevated from beast through diagram to master plan or idealisation and “God” who, on the other panel, is concretised by linear and prosaic reality. Clever play is also made of the mirror-image quality of these two words.

“Vademecum” is a pyramidal presentation of pages from Morison’s own personal (and esoteric) symbol-and-logo

dictionary. These reference-laden images are about metaphysical associations with lead, ash, excrement, reflection, blood, mercury, silver, gold and transparency. Given their obscure meanings, they make a striking and elegant work.

“Hermes” the dog-headed god is a work of frieze-like orderliness. It excites both admiration and revulsion. The excremental creature, with its golden parts and surrounded by gilded miniatures, postures in an environmental mix of base metal and gold-leaf. It is image manipulation at Morison’s formal best.

In “Golem” the artist rises to new heights of reference hunting which she pursues with unrelenting thoroughness. Ten panels of assembled aluminium plates are covered with a wealth of personal and historical pictures and paintings. By using symbols of self, of metaphor and of simile, primitive excremental, circulatory, androgenous, sexual, rational, spiritual and other primary experiences are outlined. And, by Morison’s alchemic visions and artistic skills, they becom£Mmbued with consciousness — but a consciousness that is still debased by modern identity-through-commodity substitutes. Morison is like a computer. She programmes self with codes from the past and present, from body and spirit, from reality and its reflection and from true and false, word and image. The resulting print-outs are complicated “like-human” idea-profiles. They are also luxurious, sensual and masterly statements and a unique experience for all dedicated art viewers.