Abelardo Morell
15 May – 3 July 2003
www.bernardtoalegallery.com
Surveying more than a decade of work, this concentrated selection of
photographs presented a rich overview of Abelardo Morell’s incisive
treatment of commonplace objects and optical phenomena. There were
relatively few of his ongoing camera obscura images, in which Morell
transforms entire rooms into giant cameras and photographs the inverted
world that is brought inside. His recent camera obscura images, made at
Lacock Abbey, England – the revered site of Talbot’s photographic
discoveries – were unusually restrained, subdued by the dim light and
historical weight of the place. Installed nearby was a photograph of a book
and its inverted title, reflected in a carefully positioned mirror; here
Morell offered a simultaneous positive and negative, a sly continuation of
the camera obscura’s optical play.
Morell’s fervent treatment of books spans several years and encompasses all
types of volumes. He renders them as luminous, sculptural objects – telling
cultural artifacts made more vibrant with wear. A nineteenth-century book of
needlework opens to reveal a long-forgotten shirt sample, pressed flat by
time. A detail from A Farewell to Arms streams fragments of familiar
sentences across the picture plane, the words innervating the page as they
drift in and out of focus. In Two Tall Books, a pair of exceedingly thick
volumes lean towards one another, bowing under their own weight. Made in the
wake of the collapse of the World Trade Center, they echo the doomed towers.
Recently, with his uncanny ability to re-imagine everyday things, Morell has taken to photographing money. An immense print of a dollar bill was hanging in the center of the gallery, the greatly enlarged eye of George Washington unflinchingly tracking viewers. Here, the staid presidential portrait achieves new presence as a human face rather than an emblem of the American economy. Even so, there was something faintly chilling in this staring, omniscient eye. In another photograph, a stack of bills is folded to create fantastic architecture, many stories high, like an exquisite corpse from disparate parts.
Diana Gaston