Robert Morrison A Retrospective
August 8, 2005 - October 31, 2005
feature gallery/S
Robert Morrison: A Retrospective, is the first comprehensive review of local sculptor Robert Morrison's three-decade career. The exhibition presents 16 works arranged as a series of installations. Robert Morrison: A Retrospective is sponsored by the City of Reno Arts and Culture Commission.
Drawing from art historical and personal sources to create elaborate layers of context, Morrison's work has consistently explored a realm between abstraction and the human figure. Experimenting with large steel forms, as well as with electrical, water and aural elements, Morrison creates installations that engage the viewer's senses. His sculptures convey a minimalist simplicity but are highly complex in composition. Each of Morrison's works demonstrates his concern with more than just the formal aspects of working with metal and form.
Morrison's physical and psychological traumas affect his perception of the world and are translated into his work. Tongues: the Half-Life of Morphine (1987) which is characteristic of Morrison's work with its title having more to do with the artist's mental state than with the visual nature of the work. Tongues occupies nearly 4,000 ft2 of gallery space and consists of 30 steel and fiberglass cots organized on a grid-a scene suggestive of a hospital ward. Each unit is wired to generate noise, creating an anxious atmosphere of jittery, random sound patterns. Tongues engages the viewer's sense space by punctuating it with a particularly abrasive sound. Morrison conceived the work when he was recuperating from a bone graft operation to repair a seriously broken leg. The process of making the autobiographical sculpture served as a form of escape from his physical and mental debilitation.
The exhibition also features Mumbles (1989), a series of sound based works installed in succession along the NMA's third floor atrium corridor. O'Coeur... (1989), an elegant series of steel tubs filled with rusting water, separated by gauze partitions and illuminated by individual light bulbs occupies feature gallery/N. The installation pays homage to Jacques Louis David's iconic painting The Death of Marat (1793) and mirrors the artist's personal anxieties of death and decay.
Morrison is a professor of art at the University of Nevada, Reno. He earned his post graduate degree from the University of California-Davis in 1966 and a Masters of Art from Stanford University in 1964. In addition to exhibitions throughout Nevada and California, Morrison's work has been presented at the Center for Research in Contemporary Art at the University of Texas-Arlington, the Foster Goldstrom Gallery in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lakeworth, Fla. Morrison was the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Nevada Arts Council, as well as a recipient of the 1986 Governor's Arts Award.
