Rebound exhibition by Sheila R. Alonzo

On Friday, October 17^th at 5pm, the building on 1580 Cook Street will permanently close its doors as a gallery to become a dispensary.  “Rebound” is the last exhibition to showcase at the Gallery 1580.  Though the title is optimistic, it’s still a sad affair for the artist collective to say good-bye to the affordable and convenient rental studios located in North Park.  It is with these thoughts and feelings that I review “Rebound”.   

 Connie Morey’s installation called “Spectacle” greeted me at the lobby as soon as I walked in.  Morey’s obsession with strings and textiles make nuanced sensitive subject matters tangible.  I like that Morey’s art is contemplative in nature.  There’s usually an element of surprise in her creations, I find, when a connection is made.  Morey’s art explores the intersection between the intellect and the visceral in very clever ways.  Morey’s contribution to the “Rebound” exhibition appears scientific in methodology.  She uses text to classify each round ‘planetary’ paper folds with inserts and cut images from encyclopaedias.  “Spectacle” is a poem about suspended reservoirs of knowing.

 

In the room adjacent, stood a column of cardboard stacked by Luis Mario Guerra-Veliz at about 5ft tall bringing my gaze down.  Next to the stack hung the “English Patient” wound in hospital tubes from the ceiling, allowing my eyes to follow the walls where temporary shelves held objects in varying shapes, sizes and materials in waiting, come to view.  The name of the exhibition is “Rebound” –the theme for 18 local artists to experiment and explore the idea of the book as a contemporary art form.  ‘Handle with care’ and ‘please do not touch’ instructed viewers to discriminate interactive art from the rest.

 I was naturally drawn to Caren Willms’ “Daily Knots Preserved” out of fabric and string in a glass jar.  A piece of paper tagged the knotted fabric coming out of the jar with pencil handwriting: “Oct 11 Celebration”.  I walked over to Kyle Labinsky’s book “The History of Naïve Paintings” where he filled pages with paint marking effigy, an act of defacing it, but only one quarter of the way in.  The remaining quarter of the book revealed a long black serpentine character, like an index or visual after thought.  I perceived it as political in nature, not naïve.

Caren Willms

 

In my twenty-minute visit, I kept circling back to the book of “Testament” by Diana Weymar.  It was one of those ‘handle with care’ objects.  So I picked up the little booklet dated 1866 and carefully flipped through it.  Loose colourful threads became rebound text-sewn messages on the book’s yellow-with age pages.  Sewed in one were yellow, pink, blue, green and brown was the text: BE KIND, and at the bottom: “For Liz”.  The quote by Joan Didion spanned three pages, fit for the Gallery 1580’s ending and closing exhibition.

“We are not idealized wild things.  We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that immortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses, we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves.  As we were.  As we are no longer.  As we will one day not be at all.”

Diana Weymar

Photos by Sheila R. Alonzo (except for building image via "UsedVictoria" http://www.usedvictoria.com/ReportSelectUsedAdPhoto2?used_ad_id=25169268&position=1&hb=1 )

Connie Michelle Morey at the Metchosin Art Gallery

Connie Michele Morey at The Metchosin Art Gallery

Connie Michele “ba_ble: inarticulations on human-animal relations” reviewed by Debora Alanna

 
(Part 1 – Interview with Connie Morey)

The Posthuman Condition is a way of describing human nature at this time in our history. It refers to a period after Humanism in which humans can no longer be regarded as unique, distinct from or superior to the world around them. Consequently we must adapt our understanding of the nature of mind, reality, and what it is to be human.~ ROBERT PEPPERELL [1]

Kiki Smith

 A Diary of Fluids and Fears (Interview by Francesco Bonami) (1993) [2]
KS: What is inside you is about your history. Your body is like a mandala, you focus on a point and you see all the connections surrounding it.
 
FB: In the end your works are like body fluids: you create an equivalence.
KS: They express what I am in the same way. They are not trying to prove anything except that I am here, and what I care about. They create a panorama where everything is connected to yourself.
Connie Morey’s exhibition, ba_ble: inarticulations on human-animal relations is an articulate development of her syntax, relational devices to explain the overlap and integration of poetic observations through the language of painted and sculptural investigations of being. She asserts that everything is connected to everything else – human to animal, especially. What we cannot see in our psychic and spiritual existence is presented. Her/our relationship with animals is an example with how we may coexist within the presence non-verbal dialogue, how we can discover and concede the animal nature within human existence. Morey combines visceral experience with questions about the unfathomable relating ba_ble with animals’ use of communication. Crafting emollient visual descriptions of experience, ba_ble incorporates the assault and inundation through reference to animal sensibility and substance to address the need to be attentive to animal eloquence, their seminal significance for our relations. Her work is pervasively intimates sanguinity (courage, hope, passion) and humour, but the blood allusions are dry. Ba_ble strives for hope with beatific colour, seductive animal metaphors, fur and feather challenging persistent, enveloping melancholia. Morey preens and feathers our sensibilities through promising symbiotic interconnectivity.

You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have annihilated Kant, and yet, perforce, you assume that Berkeley is wrong when you affirm that science proves the non-existence of God, or, as much to the point, the existence of matter. - You know I granted the reality of matter only in order to make myself intelligible to your understanding. Be positive scientists, if you please; but ontology has no place in positive science, so leave it alone. ~ From Martin Eden by Jack London, Martin Eden >    Chapter XXXVI. The Free Library.

A very rudimentary definition, ontology, the metaphysics of being (not domain hierarchy and other parameters included in computer science), opposes phenomenology, the philosophy base that investigates reality consisting of objects and events that form human consciousness rather than anything that is not experienced or independent of consciousness, (metaphysics considered assumptions by phenomenologists) has been an age old query recorded through philosophers delving into this deliberation of the essence of being from Aristotle to Connie Morey’s work, ba_ble. [3] Morey confidently embraces ontological premises, exploring the elusive and ethereal experientially. For her, matter matters, has intelligence, sensory capability and responds to complex existence. Consciously we experience unconscious embodiment in Morey’s work.

---

"Dysphonia (Mouth Stuffed Full)"; 2011-2012; clay slip, glaze, graphite & fur; dimensions variable
Photo courtesy Connie Morey

Dysphonia (Mouth Stuffed Full) [Installation]
Photo Courtesy Debora Alanna
...the kind of invention that is necessary to make a general scheme is limited in everybody’s experience... that is, if you like, repetition, that is if you like the repeating that is the same thing, but once started expressing this thing, expressing anything there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you must insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis. ~ Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetition” in Lectures in America, 1935.

Dysphonia. Difficulty in speaking usually from a disorder, damage, or malformation. Morey’s group of heads are hushed, insisting complacency in unison, an emphasised distress. Creamy stained darkly unvarying countenances, unseeing, smoothly nude, except for scribbling; with a tuft of fur in their mouths, and some tufting bloodied red incapacitate speech. Silenced by unspeakable violation or is the self abasement the breach? Eyes closed, the distorted writing, staining is the only indication of thought or emotion. Multiple heads as a collective blind passivity? Morey’s rejoinder to passive fury? Furry thoughts? Silence of the furred? Each of the multiplied sameness is on varied levels, poised in various directions, so we can see different views of dysphasia embodied, dysphasia because there is failure to respond involved here. What is about fur in a human mouth that is discomfiting? A mouth would feel full of animal covering, protection choking, blocking the orifice of pleasure, of breath, of sustenance and vehicle for speech, disturbing, disrupting articulation. Morey’s heads seem impervious, except for the scribbles. She shows animal smother imposed. Possibly self imposed. Fur that draws us to animals has enabled a withdrawal of spirit when a gag is imposed. Mouths jammed to capacity with mammalian coating do make speaking difficult. No furry wag, here. Dysphonia is harried thought processes made inarticulate.

---

Embodiment: (Stomach Growls)
Clay slip, glaze, & fur 2011 – 2013
Photo courtesy Connie Morey
... the synthesis which constitutes the unity of the perceived objects and which gives meaning to the perceptual data is not an intellectual synthesis. ... it is a “synthesis of transition”. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences’ [4]
The attribution of significance doesn’t depend on pure intellect which, in examining things analytically, attributes meaning and objective values which morals have incessantly imposed upon us. The attribution of significance depends on the body which, coming into the world and growing up under given circumstances, is provided with a certain meaning and certain value and so feels things differently. The body does not receive the action of things; the action is only the significance that the body attributes to things. ~ Uberto Galimberti, Il Corpo (The body), Milan, 1987, p. 114.

A diminutive ceramic male torso sequestered to a corner is half blind, with musculature and organs revealed on his head and throat, inner thigh. His abdomen is fur. Embodiment: (Stomach Growls) is a contentious discussion about perception and relationship inference. The relating begins with the animal impetus within human existence challenging human conditioning to ignore our animal selves, while we embody the intimidating constitution of animal sensations or changes in bodily functions. Fur becomes intention and objective synthesis transitioning towards the stigma of animal appetite.

The logic of imposed physicality is countered with the opposition of nonverbal growling as interaction. Illogicality of a fur front on a human is a metaphor for an animalistic presence, the furring symptom of the bestial self - a synthesis or manufactured perception of an entirety. A furred centre, an engrossing vigour, the concentration on instinctive drives is exemplified. The male’s indifference or oblivion to his innate nature is as obvious as the bare muscles or brain exposure, yet somewhat perceiving the dispensation, the release from his obligation to people, to himself with one eye open. If he was obliged to suppress the animal side of his nature, he is no longer able, or willing. Synthesis of self, the fusion of logic and desire Morey describes with this smooth blue creviced (bruising of cognisance) whitened man is a paradoxical existence, where perception of human nature is an explicit, but transitional discourse towards a preoccupation with the struggle between spiritual and instinctive existence. Morey truncates the torso at the genital area, a dipping of the belly to cover or to hide the absence of sexual functionality. The downward glance from the unemotional figure is a gesture, an amorphous nod to dismiss any import. He doesn’t seem to care about the extent or quality of his humanity, or inhumanity. Through Morey’s segregation of the figure from the rest of the exhibition, and the fur furore, reflexive of imposed morality correspond to a judgement that relegates animalistic appetites as intrusion. Embodiment: (Stomach Growls) superimposes the synthesis of animal and human appetites, which is entirely human, whether the figure cares or not.

---

"Osmophonia (The Porosity of Song)"; 2012-2013; clay slip, glaze, & feathers; dimensions variable
Photo courtesy Connie Morey

Osmophonia (The Porosity of Song) [installation and detail]
Photos courtesy Debora Alanna
Form ceases to be an ordering in time like ABA and reduces to a single, brief image, an instantaneous whole both fixed and moving... ~ Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 1955.

The smell of sound or the impulse or osmosis of sound, Osmophonia (The Porosity of Song) is a group of heads as single multiplex, like an agogic music composition, choralistic. Each choral contributor stressed a little differently. Complex thought with pretty flightless feathers impaled into the idealized sky blue ceramic move us to fixation. All over. Not just as headdresses, but all over the heads and faces - noses, mouths, eyes, and necks of several heads with different numbers of feathers situated. Numerous, the works goad, and not impulsively. Compulsively. These heads are tricky, because of the distraction of the captivating mottled blue colour heads, and the delicacy, the modulations of the salubrious feathers. The birdsong may have once been a gradual, unconscious thought slowly changing the brain of the singer(s), overcome by bird song, absorbing. A culmination of desire and mystery. The penetrations of spiky plume cores marking the pores, the sores, the holes for the porosity of vocalized musicality, sensations once an observable impetus now, with the bird feathers piercing and stabbing, sounds of provocation drive irrationally. This work does not present heads porously imbibing a bird’s sensibilities, adopting a bird’s beauteous qualities, as their song, or their plumage decoratively. This work is a song of oppression, the suffocation of personality where the idea, the fragrance of singing a delicate bird warble is all that remains of the female osmoceptor. Absorption of otherness is a fait accompli. Morey shows subjugation is vociferous, hard headed.

---

"Language as Longing: earthenware, glaze and dissection pins, dimensions variable, 2010
Photo courtesy Connie Morey
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens:
‘On Eternity:
I mean, d'you know what eternity is? There's this big mountain, see, a mile high, at the end of the universe, and once every thousand years there's this little bird-"
"What little bird?" said Aziraphale suspiciously.
"This little bird I'm talking about. And every thousand years-"
"The same bird every thousand years?"
Crowley hesitated. "Yeah," he said.
"Bloody ancient bird, then."
"Okay. And every thousand years this bird flies-"
"-limps-"
"flies all the way to this mountain and sharpens its beak-"
"Hold on. You can't do that. Between here and the end of the universe there's loads of-" The angel waved a hand expansively, if a little unsteadily. "Loads of buggerall, dear boy."
"But it gets there anyway," Crowley persevered.
"How?"
"It doesn't matter!"
"It could use a space ship," said the angel.
Crowley subsided a bit. "Yeah," he said. "If you like. Anyway, this bird-"
"Only it is the end of the universe we're talking about," said Aziraphale. "So it'd have to be one of those space ships where your descendants are the ones who get out at the other end. You have to tell your descendants, you say, When you get to the Mountain, you've got to-" He hesitated. "What have
they got to do?"
"Sharpen its beak on the mountain," said Crowley. "And then it flies back-"
"-in the space ship-"
"And after a thousand years it goes and does it all again," said Crowley quickly.’

Ovoid, rounded elliptically, each work in this collection of deferential presages give presence to the ache of birthing, of the not quite born, the longing for life. The life of thought. A peek at birds still in their eggshells, without the egg. The lines around the birds conform to the bird shapes, caressing and differentiating the yet unuttered. What cannot be voiced, when in suspended formation. Wind lines flying over and around. Red of emergence tints and maybe contaminates with demise, if this is a life cycle in the other direction. These could be birds dead in their containment. These birds are pinned for inspection, with dissection pins. Investigation of the raison d’être (reason for existence), of birds. Birds with wings poised to fly, mired, or nascent with possibility. Time flies.[5] Maybe a collection of memories of birds’ flight, journeys. Birds marking memory. Many memories collected in mountainous formation, an elevated horizon. As if they are formed to remember where they have been. Wanting to fly again, eternally.

---

"Small Bird Trap (Learning to Sing)"; wood, crocheted string, stain; 2011-2012; dimensions variable; collaborative work with Christina & Irvin Morey
Photo courtesy Connie Morey

Small Bird Trap (Learning to Sing) [Installation]
Photo courtesy Debora Alanna
Heart’s blood and bitter pain belong to love,
And tales of problems no one can remove;
Cupbearer, fill the bowl with blood, not wine -
And if you lack the heart’s rich blood take mine.
Love thrives on inextinguishable pain,
Which tears the soul, then knits the threads again.
A mote of love exceeds all bounds; it gives
The vital essence to whatever lives.
But where love thrives, there pain is always found;
Angels alone escape this weary round -
They love without that savage agony
Which is reserved for vexed humanity. 
 
~ فرید الدین عطار, (Farid ud-din Attar). The Conference of the Birds.[6]
 
Cunning, elegantly complex and varied, somewhat heart shaped crocheted bird traps mounted on smooth dark poles with faulty perches to waylay birds, shiny slim dead-weight stones tied to the trappings ensure the encapsulation, full round interwoven mouths would enable birds’ confinement, arranged capture. For future consequence. For the thrall, birds that will be caught. Voicing their hearts’ desire, to escape. This work is a metaphor for love’s stratagem. How the heart’s strings capture what is wild, hope designing, concealing devices for arresting, securing birds’ song expanse. The untamed but coveted possibilities emulating bird song allure are exemplified in this work. Yearning for sources in air is priming for the fall. Stones weighing the waiting, the trapping mouths the song. Why can birds do what human hearts cannot? Setting traps for the impossibility of bird capture, encapsulating bird characteristics, is the song of vexation. We learn to sing by capturing nothing, trapping nothing. Morey’s traps are empty. The pain of longing, waiting, which here is for birds to be trapped is on a level pegging to the deception of hearts trapping. Learning to sing is the freedom of heart’s desire to never to be trapped, even if the traps are confected delicate and intriguing.

---

"Taxonaphonia" (DETAIL), Library cabinet, pyrographied letters, faux fur, thread and paper, 2012-2013
Photo courtesy Connie Morey

Taxonaphonia – Detail
Photo courtesy Connie Morey

Taxonaphonia – Detail
Photo courtesy Debora Alanna

Taxonaphonia – Details
Photos courtesy Debora Alanna
I am for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind mans metal walking stick. ~ Robert Rauschenberg. From “I am for an art...” from Store Days, 1967.
Connie Morey, on her website about Taxonaphonia:
taxon -
from taxonomy
from the Greek táxis - 'arrangement', 'management' & nomíā ,
related to nómos  - 'law'
(taxonomy, n.d.)
aphonia-
from  the Greek aphōnos - ‘voiceless’, 'without voice' 
(aphonia, n.d.)

Wisdom, a unique human attribute rich in history dating back to the dawn of civilization, is a newcomer to the world of empirical research. For centuries, wisdom was the sole province of religion and philosophy.^[7] A standard philosophical (in Greek, philos-sophia = lover of wisdom) definition of wisdom pertains to judicious application of knowledge, ^[8] and most religions have considered it a virtue. 
 

Wisdom is thought to be a complex construct, with several subcomponents. While the relative emphasis on specific subcomponents has varied across cultures and periods, there have been more similarities than differences among different postulated concepts of wisdom. While classic Greek writings on wisdom focused on rationality, early Indian and Chinese thinkers stressed emotional balance. ^{[9] - [10]} Yet, these conceptualizations of wisdom
shared several common features, such as thoughtful decision making, compassion, altruism, and insight. Excellent accounts of the history of the concept of wisdom are available. ^{[11]-[12]-[13]}

^~ Neurobiology of Wisdom. A Literature Overview. Thomas W. Meeks, MD; Dilip V. Jeste, MD. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2009;66(4):355-365. doi:10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2009.8.

Taxonaphonia is the silence that challenges a cultural assertion. Morey’s work gives credence to unknown animalistic acumen, the wisdom gleaned from the unclassifiable. This work questions the premise, according to Taxology, the relative importance of the homosapien at the top of the biological assessment categories, scientific law principals that is therefore deemed homosapiens as most wise, wiser than animals. Morey asserts that this ordering, and resulting implication of the wisdom of homosapiens classified through taxology principals is flawed and further investigates ideas about how the symbiosis of human and animal pertain to a wider concept of wisdom.

Crafted, unevenly fantastic creatures labeled with Latin poetics incorporating adaptations of the suffix sapien acknowledging the innate wisdom within body parts live in a library cabinet branded with burnt muddled letters. A library housing books was referenced in this reconfigured coffer. Now the cabinet drawers hold indefinable handmades that establish we can define wisdom through humour of the mysterious and extraordinary, and what is impossible as taxonomy. The arrangement and management of thoughts, empirical evidence collected, as a library would collect printed thoughts to define wisdom is in question. The voiceless critters are demanding reconsideration and redefinition as conceptual wisdom. Morey voices an acknowledgement of what Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party strived to achieve [14] for example, where dinner plates acknowledge a crafted wisdom, and also refer to the multiple meaning of Sapien (wise and .to taste). Personified animalized subjects assert a prickly wisdom. Morey responds as Chicago did to the politics of denigrating craft as a source of wisdom.

Morey asks, ‘What then is meant by wisdom?  By whom and how is it defined? And who is excluded from this politics of language?’[15] Morey evokes timeless female sensibilities to answer her questions. Interesting that the ancient goddesses of wisdom were also the goddesses associated with the arts, craft, poetry, creativity – Brighid, Minerva, Neith, Metis, Snotra, Anahita, Vör, Saraswati, Athena, and many more. They were revered for the creative weaving of society, the leadership of the arts, as the means for a flow of creativity. Many were associated with animals, nature. The olive tree and owl, for Athena, Saraswati’s Ganesh, the elephant and lotus, for example. Wisdom was predominantly a female deity, in those cultured minds. Wisdom for the worshipers was the result of the art’s breadth, and was valued leadership. This obsolete veneration is now a poetic symbiosis, where we benefit from the relationship with the ages as inspiration of multifaceted existence. Morey’s Taxaphonia is the quiet determination that lost symbology can be resurrected is evident in the collection of ambiguous beings in a chest labelling (Morey associates her non-literal creations with Latin labelling) her warily crafted animal spirits as entities with unidentified wisdom of body parts, a means to sensory exploration and understanding to refer to what was available and important wisdom, associated with animal evocations in pre-scientific eras and is still viable. Morey answers her own questions. She has recorded and stored the ageless crafting of female wisdom, even if the crafting is a bit circumspect.

---

"Following (Rumination)"; acrylic, photographs, encaustic and string on paper & cradle panels; 25 panels; dimensions variable; 2012

Detail: Following (Rumination)
Photos courtesy Connie Morey
"The strategies of this right (for more) to follow [droit de suite] that I have just evoked resemble those of the hunt, whether the animal thereby follows its desire, what is desirable in its desire (or in its need, as will be said by those who wish, out of desire or need, to believe in an ironclad distinction between the two, desire and need, just as in the distinction between man and animal), or whether, while following its drive, the animal finds itself followed, tracked by the drive of the other.  And we should not exclude the possibility that the same living creature is at the same time follower and followed, tracked by the drive of the other." (Jacques Derrida, 2008, p. 55) [ from Connie Morey’s website]

"But can we, for our part, reply to the question "But as for me, who am I?" And what would ever distinguish the response, in its total purity, the so-called free and responsible response, from a reaction to a complex system of stimuli?  And what, after all, is a citation?" (Jacques Derrida, 2008, p. 53-54) [16] [ from Connie Morey’s website]
 

Gregor was shocked when he heard his own voice answering, it could hardly 

be recognised as the voice he had had before.  As if from deep inside him, 

there was a painful and uncontrollable squeaking mixed in with it, the 

words could be made out at first but then there was a sort of echo which 

made them unclear, leaving the hearer unsure whether he had heard properly 

or not. ~ Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis. 1915. Translated by David Wyllie. 

Copyright (C) 2002 David Wyllie. PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK METAMORPHOSIS [17]

Morey assembles pictorial references to childhood imagery, with fluffy noiseless sheep cut out of cradle panels and pasted on wide red bordered squares. Illuminating dots detail the configurations, expressive of what is in the air, what is felt but not spoken. Loosely linking animals’ mouth to mouth and ear to ear sensory organ to nowhere, just hanging. With string as exchanged connections, Morey sometimes directs lines to speech bubbles scribbled as indiscernible conversations. Sequences of suspended successions lead to a bound end, a collected wrapping topping the squared images. Wrapping up the tendrils of exchange. Although some lines are dropped.

On her website, Morey accompanies photos of her installation, Following (Rumination) with Jacques Derrida’s philosophical contemplations. Strategies for desire, desire and need as an ensemble or distinctly separate, following, followed, tracking tracked? Man divided from animal or living creatures with the same desire and needs, as intertwined connectivity? Who is following what or who? "But as for me, who am I?" Derrida asks, and Morey asks with this work.

Sheep have several cultural associations. That these were lamb images initially adornment for children, innocence personified is asserted as a desirable quality, an aspiration or willful insistence to follow choices that do not result in the best outcomes. The sheep/lamb for sleeping with or by as a count, the sheep for/as woolly comfort, the sheep as communing spirits, gathering, the lamb needing, following is comfortable – objectives of consequence, of virtue, of purity where following is naivety and awkward. The only hunt for the sheep/lamb is the hunting for a fresh patch of grass, or parental direction or as the elder guide, ideally, but when all are without guidance, miscommunication can result. Morey presents no animal longing or impassioned need. Each animal is segregated. Communicating is simplified, indirect and when cartoon-like speech bubbles are scattered amongst the frank animal interconnectedness, the scribbles are confusion. Abiding these incorruptible sheep is challenging.

Desire as need is the need for interconnectivity. Morey’s strings link communication between sheep, and between the bubbles (people). People longing for connection, following the sheep examples are muddled by the simplicity. Who are we that the inexplicable transmission through sight and sound, of contact is fuddling? Clouds of bewilderment. Sheep flocked may need to follow a shepherd, but Morey’s Following (Rumination) needs no shepherding for her assembly of ba_bes. Morey ministers to us that bleat. The bleating is the unclear voicing within human relations. We need to ruminate, Morey shows us, explicates our need to communicate while expounding on our resistance to be clear. What the sheep in this work do well is pretty complacency, ignoring their capacity for attaining understanding, which remains our quest. Entwined connectivity? We are in a bit of a tangle with each other, as the sheep deliveries and responses are swooping lines criss-crossing and cornered. We need to follow, hunt, plot the dots of ephemera to connect with what the sheep/lambs are not endowed with for any kind of consequential, desirable need to be addressed. Morey articulates being, a complex follow and our necessitating interdependence on instinctive relations, suspending our desires for those buoyant ephemera.

This work is a metaphor for how we articulate, and are inarticulate. We hang on conversation, sometimes sinking thoughts trail or are misdirected, sometimes. We monitor ourselves, and adhere collectively to the quality distinguishing ourselves from other ruminants. Morey’s sheep strive to communicate, and the speech scribbles articulate the misunderstanding, inarticulate thoughts. As Kafka described in Metamorphosis, when we are in the process of change, we cannot recognize our own voice. Transformative, Morey’s voices our sheepishness with formative imagery, sheep floating desirous, connected by drooping string lines and indecipherable intention that imparts communication processes and processing. Morey deliberates our sheepish natures, how it is more comfortable follow even if the following is misunderstanding, which is cause for rumination.

---

Photo courtesy Connie Morey
(Regurgitation; toy cow, clay, acrylic, paper, ink and synthetic grass on wood shelf; 2008-2013)

Details: Regurgitation
Photos courtesy Debora Alanna

Cantilevered from the wall, Morey constructs a platform for a symbolic gurgitation of her Master’s Thesis, with a magnifying glass so we can read the minuscule text of her actual miniaturized Thesis. Exposing the innards of the cow body, Morey, shows how a thesis becomes one’s viscera. Digesting the content of an argument, a view of the digestion accessories becomes bare, revealing the guts it takes to consume data and theorize, and finally regurgitating the processing that becomes the thesis releasing as the cow’s mouth discharge. Morey’s miniaturized Masters Thesis is on the scrolled paper emitting from the cow, and hanging from a loop on the outer pseudo lawn, a pristine concourse retaining the cow. The hanging Thesis has departed from the creator (cow), the female giver of good things to consume, now a giver of a theory, the result of ingesting information, absorbing the ideas to integrate into the product. Regurgitation is the outcome of what Morey assimilated, and is now expelled for public inspection. The female scholar as a cow grazing knowledge, which is now regurgitated is confounding as it is cute, even charming but is difficult feminist analogy. The equivalence parallels the derogative female name yet Morey shows force, is not cowed, and is not intimidated by the sacred cow, academia, as her humour decrees, don’t have a cow. .

---

("Articulate Bodies"; 2011; watercolour, acrylic, graphite, pen and thread on paper, 2 x 22" x 30)
Photo courtesy Connie Morey

Detail: Articulate Bodies
Photo courtesy Debora Alanna

Vectors of subjectification do not necessarily pass through the individual, which in reality appears to be something like a ‘terminal’ for processes that involve human groups, socio-economic ensembles, data-processing machines, etc.  Therefore, interiority establishes itself at the crossroads of multiple components, each relatively autonomous in relation to the other, and, if need be, in open conflict.
(Guattari, 2008: 25) [18]

Stitched to the work, a fox hovers in the midst of a spilled blood red wash with distinct marked spheres connected with lines as the middle ground. Articulate Bodies holds the interconnected essence of what is eloquent and lucid, but impalpable. The fox is sutured to the reddish variable streaming wash, an uncomfortable taint. Morey creates a constellation of fox, astute presence crafted into ethereal dimensions, a correlation between what is familiar and inexplicable. The stain, a veneer of pervading memory, a semblance of evocation bleeds behind the spots, perhaps micro Felix Guattari terminals (quote above), sites drawn together to configure what can be articulated, bodies of penetration present and distinct without the need of the usual sensory faculties. If there is conflict, it is signified by the red background evocation. The lines connecting the differentiated circles with perforated surrounds, criss-cross the flushed expanse, and are oblivious to the animal presence, which demands our attention. Morey ensures that we are attentive to the fox existence facing the viewer. The fox becomes the representative of ecosophical wisdom that Arne Næss speaks about: By an ecosophy I mean a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium. A philosophy as a kind of sofia (or) wisdom, is openly normative, it contains both norms, rules, postulates, value priority announcements and hypotheses concerning the state of affairs in our universe. Wisdom is policy wisdom, prescription, not only scientific description and prediction. The details of an ecosophy will show many variations due to significant differences concerning not only the ‘facts’ of pollution, resources, population, etc. but also value priorities.[19] Morey insists that although the universe/universal articulations she represents with the hubs of interconnected dots, the value of ecological priorities that the fox stance distinguishes as the a priori fact where the rest of our experience originates from - the suspended, interconnected widespread bodies of thinking, endeavours that inform and motivate, are our consciousness that depends on acknowledging the confounding fox as an intimate and ancient wisdom, is the prescription for future values.

---

"Symbiophonia"; Pen on paper; 3 x 22" x 30"; 2013

DETAIL Symbiophonia
Photos courtesy Connie Morey

If no one learns to sing you, song,
I do not mind at all: no one
Could sing you as I can.

~ Fourth Day: Conclusion. P. 299. The Decameròn (Il Decameron, cognominato Prencipe Galeotto). 1351 or 1353 by Giovanni Boccaccio. Tr. by J. G. Nichols. Everyman’s Library. Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

A natal sky, a cellular expanse has a human turned inward inspecting on its edge, listening to the marcro cellscape constitution made available by Morey, while a dog inspects us. Human and canine are also composed of highly differentiated cells. Morey devises the associations possible with symbiotic relationships, the interdependence that impacts all living entities. Morey crafts the resonance of these symbiotic relationships, which may be complementary, mutually beneficial. Morey concentrates on optimistic, ideal symbiosis, especially from a human perspective that benefit species involved but symbiosis can be parasitism, where one species feeds off another, the host and generally diminishes because of the other’s thriving, commensalism, where only one species benefits, and the other usually is unaffected, amensalism where one species is harmed or inhibited and the other is unaffected. Natural entails of all these types of symbiotic relational constructs. Morey shows symbiosis generatively, involving positivity. Her cellular matters are enlivened colours speaking through the scene and are within the work’s figure turned away and inward, within the tethered animal looking outward, at us. What Morey succeeds in revealing is what the metaphysical can intone and what we can perceive as a type of unique symbiosis, our irrefutably beneficial animal-human relationship, animal and human connectivity and our longing for and draw towards nature that is sound affirmation - encouraging, is creatively synergistic, restorative. If the animal was wild, not tethered in time to its human, this would be a different sounding scenario. The human would not be casually listening to benefitting causality. The androgynous human is alone tied to the dog, the dog’s attachment. The two seem to be an insulated existence. Morey dots in her cellular vista, splotches of the indefinable in the cosmos, can only be understood metaphysically.

The human may seem to intently listen independently; the dog may seem to hear what we thoughts we are thinking, though we think they are our own, our own song. What we internalize, we sonically embody, hear, feel, our consciousness is merely more spots cohabitating a symbiotic exchange, cellular interconnections on the verge of the universe. Morey articulates those sounds of the spheres tacitly.

---

Connie Michele Morey
ba_ble: inarticulations on human-animal relations
Xchanges Gallery
Victoria BC
1st February – 24 February 2013
Part 2 – Review by Debora Alanna

---

[1] http://pepperell.blogspot.ca/
[2] Originally published in Flash Art International, Milan, Italy, January /
February 1993.
[3] http://ontology.buffalo.edu/
[4] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,” from The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, pp. 121-127. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Translation ©1964 by Northwestern University Press.
⁴ "...While we dawdle, our lives pass swiftly. The proverb has been traced back in English to 1386 in Chaucer's 'Prologue to the Clerk's Tale.' The earliest American appearance in print is 1710 in 'Mayflower Descendant.' The idea was first expressed by Virgil (70-19 B.C.), who wrote in the 'Aeneid': Fugit inreparabile tempus' (Time is flying never to return)..." [5] From "Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings" by Gregory Y. Titelman.
[6] http://www.scribd.com/doc/49161532/The-conference-of-the-birds
[7] Takahashi  M Toward a culturally inclusive understanding of wisdom: historical roots in the East and West. Int J Aging Hum Dev 2000;51 (3) 217- 230
[8] Webster's Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language.  New York, NY Lexicon Publications1990;
[9] Jeste  DVVahia  I Comparison of the conceptualization of wisdom in ancient Indian literature with modern views: focus on the Bhagavad Gita. Psychiatry 2008;71 (3) 197- 209
PubMed
[10] Takahashi  MOverton  WF Cultural foundations of wisdom: an integrated developmental approach. Sternberg  RJJordan  JA Handbook of Wisdom Psychological Perspectives.New York, NY Cambridge University Press2005;32- 60
[11] Brugman  GM Wisdom and Aging.  Amsterdam, Netherlands Elsevier2006;
[12] Birren  JESvensson  CM Wisdom in history. Sternberg  RJJordan  JA Handbook of Wisdom Psychological Perspectives. New York, NY Cambridge University Press2005;3- 31
[13] Ardelt  M Wisdom as expert knowledge system: a critical review of a contemporary operationalization of an ancient concept. Hum Dev 2004;47 (5) 257- 285
[14] Excerpts from The Dinner Part: A Symbol of Our Heritage (1979). Copyright © Judy Chicago.
[15] http://www.conniemorey.com/taxonaphonia.html
[16] http://www.conniemorey.com/following.html
[17] http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=3248835&pageno=3
[18] Guattari, Felix. The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Continuum, 2008). - See more at: http://eighteen.fibreculturejournal.org/2011/10/09/fcj-121-transversalising-the-ecological-turn-four-components-of-felix-guattari%E2%80%99s-ecosophical-perspective/#sthash.5C4wm7Mr.50ngPAZg.dpuf
[19] http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/DrengEcophil.html

Connie Michele Morey – ba_ble: articulations on human-animal relations by Debora Alanna

 
PART 1 - Interview with Connie Michele Morey – 5 February 2013 with Debora Alanna
http://www.conniemorey.com/
(Parentheses are descriptions by Debora Alanna)

DA I find these very moving. Sculpturally, they impact. Would you please start with this?
( "Language as Longing:, earthenware, glaze and dissection pins, dimensions variable, 2010)

CM Sure. This is work that I did a couple of years ago. All the work in the exhibition is part of my studio research related to my doctorate. This work is about the relation between desire and dominance, or the threshold between them. At the time I made this, I was thinking about birds, and how much we learn from our experience with birds. We may not be able to make a formula for what we learn – it is something much more intuitive. I was thinking about how our relationship with animals is one where we feel inspired by them, and sometimes awestruck by them, and how that experience is so positive that it results in desire to capture that experience and that desire teeters over into dominance. It’s not only this way with our relationship with birds but our relationship with anything that is different from us.

There is a quote that’s by Luce Irigaray [i], where she talks about her experience of butterflies. She was enthralled with them as a child but she also wanted to control and capture them. How is it possible that we can have a relationship with birds - or anything we deem different - and it not become one of control or dominance, to be able to appreciate what it is, as it is.

DA These are almost egg like, contained in their own visceral environment.

CM I like that interpretation.
The original image was a bird that looked like it was both dead and alive. I don’t know if that is apparent.

DA It’s successful. I saw that.

CM I started with rectangular tiles, but they felt too rigid, too controlled for a work that is negotiating the line between desire and dominance. Dominance almost becomes a violence against something. If I have to capture something to be able to appreciate it, I’ve imposed some violence on that creature. And if I was to appreciate something in a space of its own I don’t want to have that element of control. For me, these tiles have the sense of being free but also restraint because of the dissection pins holding them in place. I am trying to play between that tension of freedom and being controlled.

DA Could you talk about the lines around the birds?

CM The work evolved intuitively. When I look at them now I think those lines show that there is no space that isn’t activated. There is no space that is empty. The lines give movement and motion. The fact that the birds are cropped or cut off implies there is something beyond this space.

DA Connie, is there any reason you have put this in a horizontal stance?

CM I would have to say no. Again, it is intuitive. I would have to say the reason is not a formulated conscious objective.

DA The birds have become the landscape. It’s almost as if they have built some consecutive landscape and the formation is almost mountainous.

CM I love this take. See this is where you and I together make meaning of the work. It’s never just me. Often when people tell me what they see in the work, it makes perfect sense. It alters my perception a little bit. But it also adds to it. I think the colour is important in the work. I find that I am very attracted to this range of reds and pinks that some people would consider as me expressing some type of violence. But I think these are like the life lines that makes us who we are.

DA Blood is red.

CM Yes it is. But I don’t always see it as violent. I know it has the potential to be red in that way, but I also see it as something that is intensely beautiful. For example, for a child to be born, it is sort of - I hesitate to use the word, but it is sort of a violent act. It is intense and involves some rupture. So I think in that sense, out of things that are very difficult, there is an opening – that is a positive thing. Red, for me, is something that shows the complexity of that. It has some sense of beauty.

DA A dichotomy?

CM . A dichotomy implies they are opposites. I would say they are completely dependent on each other.

DA Okay. I would like to talk about this work.
("Small Bird Trap (Learning to Sing)"; 2011-2012; wood, crocheted thread, stain; dimensions variable, collaborative work with Christina and Irvin Morey)


CM This work I did in collaboration with my mom, dad and my son. It was done not very long ago but I’ve redone it several times…. Can I show you how they work?

DA Yes
CM Normally what would happen is there would be a tree, maybe a sapling, that would have a hole drilled through it, and there would be a rock with a little noose on it. And this (top) would be pointed so the bird wouldn’t land on it. The bird would land on this perch, and the string would fall out, causing their foot to get trapped in the noose. I have been thinking about how I can make it more apparent without me demonstrating it. It’s has the idea of a trap, but it also has this net below it, which catches it. I wanted it to feel a little bit like a nest, a home - between nurture and control. Again it’s this desire, which is both complete appreciation of the beauty of the bird and the dominance of the capture of holding something down. It no longer exists in a space of its own or has its own choice.
I am really interested in mixing craft with traditional art practices like sculpture and installation, and playing with those boundaries. If you look at the work there are a lot of the elements that have some sort of contemporary craft incorporated into sculpture.
I am interested in craft because it is women who have been excluded from the traditions of fine art and because of that so have their practises. I think also non-western cultures have been excluded from western fine arts, as well as others. The male trajectory of what western fine arts used to be. Not any more, but what it used to be. I am interested in this boundary of inclusion and exclusion. I am interested in that history.

DA I would like to talk about this piece. (continuing to talk about Small Bird Trap) Besides the meaning behind it, there is the visual structure. I have discomfort with this work, with what you have embraced here. Not because it is disturbing, but because it is very beautiful. And that in itself is a problem for me.

CA Because it is aesthetic?

DA Yes.

CA And is it because it becomes an object?

DA No. Does the repetition involved earlier enable it or disable it?

CA With the repetition, there are two things. There’s me, in the process of repeating and making something over and over. And then there is the object, being repeated. It is very hard for me to make a singular work. I always work in series. That work (a single work in the corner titled Embodiment: Stomach Growls) is the one that makes me the most uncomfortable.

The reason is that I have problems with the preciousness of an object. And objects for me become a part of the way I feel about the world. I see the world as always engaging a community. I see it being even more complex than an ecosystem. There is always more going on than the singular. Western traditions have a tendency to see you as an individual. We talk about isolated individuals, as autonomous individuals. That any decision I make comes solely from me and largely impacts me and my future. I don’t fit with that way of thinking. To make a singular object, an isolated object, emphasizes for me, that the object exists by itself. There isn’t anything in the world that exists in this way. It always involves relationships. However, I think there are a whole bunch of reasons why people would approach the repetition and see it in a completely different way.

DA I like multiples. That isn’t what I was referring to. I was referring to your crocheted work. And I love the stone associated. I had no idea of the system you have evolved. I really like what you are saying. Ojbecthood in itself is powerful. A point of reference, and is a possible way to incorporate all things material-wise. I think this has a lot to say about isolation, what the meaning of community versus isolation is.

CM I am not saying that I find objects on a whole problematic. I love objects. I make objects. I am not denying that I make objects. The perspective that I am looking at the world from right now is one that is about being dependent upon much more than myself. Who knows? In ten years I might be – I have never done it, but I might be making a whole bunch of single objects. I don’t dismiss other people making objects. There is so much work out there that is... I am thinking of Abigail Doan who makes these gorgeous little crocheted nest-like balls that are objects. We seem to see objects as not placed in a context. This is less the case within critically engaged contemporary art practice, I think. But when somebody comes to an object or comes to an individual we tend to talk, in Western culture, about people as if they are not dependent upon nature, as if they are not dependent upon animals, as if they are not dependent upon - me talking to you, as if my voice is just going across to your ears and entering at one point, there. There is so much more going on. That is what I am interested in.

DA I would like to talk about ("Taxonaphonia" (DETAIL), Library cabinet, pyrographied letters, faux fur, thread and paper, 2012-2013 ) I have to say, it is problematic for me.


CM I like that you say that openly.

DA I have seen cabinets of curiosity before. It is not you, particularity, it’s the genre. This is almost the antithesis of what you were just saying.

CM I don’t know that I would see this as a cabinet of curiosity. And I also don’t know that I would see my art as promoting my view of the world. I see it more as me critically engaging with both perspectives and trying to figure out what I think about it through that. Engaging with the degree to which we are individuals and the degree to which we are dependent is a negotiation that I do through my work. I wouldn’t say that my work promotes the idea of interdependence. I am not interested in doing that.

DA Okay.

CM I don’t want to preach anything. I am just trying to figure things out for myself. My work engages with the process of questioning the boundaries between those two things. So it’s always a threshold or a boundary. When I think about something being contained or being porous I think it is a negotiation or questioning. This work is a questioning, not a statement.
This one ("Taxonaphonia”, Library cabinet, pyrographied letters, faux fur, thread and paper, 2012-2013) is about language. About how language can be used as something that separates us from other species or something that connects us, making the world something that is much more experiential. If you think about the difference between a poem or definition... when I enter a poem, I enter it experientially, I can get in the poem, I feel like I am a part of it. If I look at a definition if feels more like I am on the outside looking in at this definition or thing defined.

DA Your labels on the work are poetic descriptions.

CM Yes. They are poetic descriptions of things that are usually referred to as more precise and definitive. And in that sense, they are trying to open meaning up. This comes partly from the fact that I am doing a PhD and I am housed in a department that is situated in the social sciences – which tends to rely on the sciences and its methods and I have a background in art, which is much more experiential. I have to negotiate language in a way that bridges those two traditions.

DA Is that why the alphabet is all jumbled here?

CM I think this is an opening up of language, so that language becomes a pattern. When I burned the letters in I was thinking about stamping and branding that happens with animals. That practice, functions, in a way like a definition, it holds something down as a method of control or domination. I think there are moments when we dominate language. Where we say, you are a homo sapien, and you are something else. There are political ramifications and cultural roots for these definitions. But we make them as though they are universal.

DA You have used Latin for the titles and I don’t know what they are.

CM Cilium is eyelash in Latin. I wouldn’t know this except I looked it up. And sapien is the word ‘wise’. I mention a little bit about this in a small book I made about the work. Around 250 years ago, human beings… man at that time… was labelled homo sapien. So man named himself ‘man the wise’. But, in doing that, he essentially said this is what sets man apart. The thing that makes man a particular species is wisdom. This act disallows wisdom to some extent, to others that aren’t humans. By including the word ‘sapien’ in the labels on the work, I am playing or pushing the boundaries of what is meant by ‘wise’. I’m proposing that ‘wise’ isn’t something that just belongs to human beings. To see wisdom as a human possession, I have to understand myself as a human being that is completely isolated, in this sense, I didn’t get wisdom from the birds or another experience with the world. Each label includes the word ‘wise’ because the work is playing with or pushing the boundaries of what is considered wise. It is also playing with taxonomical language that holds something down, in that sense the work is an attempt to open meaning up.

DA They (works in drawers) are really high contrast in texture and development – even the case in relation to the objects in the drawers. They are almost worlds, even galaxies apart.

CM They are meant to embody difference. They are meant to be unnameable. It seems that I know what an apple is and I don’t know what an apple is. I call it an apple, but there is no particular apple that is like this generalization. We have all these stereotypes. These words that make us seem that we know what something is, but we don’t know. Even if we experience it, we only do so from one perspective. These works are meant to embody difference. They are very different from the cabinet. When you open the drawer, they seem like they don’t fit in. They are others that have been excluded; they are not quite animals. We could say they are and are not what animals look like.

DA If you put all the cabinet drawers to a certain level, you obliterate the view (inside the drawers).

CM Yes, it’s true. I want people to play with this. I want people to do things with it.

DA This book(s) is/are in association with your exhibition?

CM I don’t think the work needs the book. It’s me contemplating the work in another medium. It’s a reflection of the work in another form. So it can exist separately.

DA This ("Following (Rumination)"; acrylic, photographs, encaustic and string on paper & cradle panels; 25 panels; dimensions variable; 2012) looks like a child’s wall. With string that connects the pieces.

CM Craft is seen as something that is not critically engaged, not serious. We tend to categorize anything we deem as ‘different’ and can’t relate to (like the creatures in “Taxonaphonia”), as disturbing, threatening or we sentimentalise or infantilize it. So that it is so childlike that it needs our care; this is the approach of colonial history. We rationalized violence through the language of nurture and disallowed choice. I think the same is true with our relations with animals. They either become this wild beast we are fearful of or they become these really sweet, cute things that are intellectually inferior, like how we think of a cow or a sheep. Craft that has been excluded is a little bit different. I don’t know if we have been fearful of it, but certainly fearful of women’s traditions to some extent. Like ‘femme fatales’, for example. But definitely we sentimentalized craft. We’ve made it not politically or socially engaged. Not subversive.

I have a friend who recently went to South Africa. In the small village she visited there is a group of women who are mostly grandmothers and are there caring for their grandchildren. The community has a high percentage of HIV positive people. The women there have been making tapestries, which are embroidered with unbelievable detail, they are gorgeous. They are also very politically engaged. They show the politics of HIV, of children dying – they are about issues that are both intensely personal and political. I think even the word ‘decorative’ is problematic here, craft, even sentimental craft is about more than decoration; it is highly political.
This, "Following (Rumination)", is both about that and about animals being sentimentalized to the point of no longer having any power. If I was to put this string here (disconnecting the string connection to another part of the work) this sheep no longer has a power of speech.

DA This is string, not wool. Why? You have all these sheep, but you have used string, not wool.

CM I don’t think it needs to be wool.

DA I don’t know if this applies...When we were kids, we used to play telephone with cans, and use string attached to the cans to carry the sound. That’s the way I look at it – that’s what you are doing. You are using string to carry the speech. And you have speech bubbles, too.

CM Right, and there are strings coming from their ears too, at times. I hadn’t thought of that but I think it’s a legitimate thing to see. It makes sense.
I am interested in string, there is string in my work, there’s thread. I stitch up things. I am interested in it because string shows the connections between things. The work is, in part, about how things are connected and disconnected. This work is a good example of where I am not interested in making a statement or trying to promote something. I am really questioning. There are moments when you can move these strings so they are disallowing speech. There are some that don’t have anything and are completely isolated. And there are some that are connected only to each other. And some that are connected to speech bubbles. I am not really interested in making a firm statement, I am interested in questioning… although I have ethical concerns about our treatment of animals.
I think these animals (sheep) are really sentimentalized. Sentimentalizing animals is a highly political act. And I think to say something is sentimental it makes it seem as if it is passive. But how is that passive?

DA No. It is very strong.

CM It’s very strong. It’s hugely political. Especially when you think about how much has been excluded by deeming something as such. The more sweet and toy-like they look the more political they seem to me. You don’t expect that to be included within serious art discussions, although I am sure there are instances where it has been.

DA For me, this work is about being seen and heard. It’s very powerful. I was struck by the presence of the voicing. I find it very moving.

CM Thank you.

DA You have the dots again. Dot, dot, dot. It is interesting because it is almost a separate dialogue happening.

CM It’s in the holes as well.

DA Yes, and the holes with the fur, feathers.

Do you want to talk about the heads? ("Dysphonia (Mouth Stuffed Full)"; 2011-2012; clay slip, glaze, graphite & fur; dimensions variable) / ("Osmophonia (The Porosity of Song)"; 2012-2013; clay slip, glaze, & feathers; dimensions variable)


CM I never think that one thing is just one thing. A dot is both a dot and a hole. It is both a positive and negative, present and absent. When I think about the thresholds between things like desire and dominance or nurturing and control – those lines between everything, they exist almost like a dot or hole. There is a line where they are interdependent, much like life and death. If you think about the point of death, being like a hole – a loss of something that is on one hand tragic. And this, almost negative hole also provides an opening where you can see things in a slightly different light than you did before, the hole becomes a presence, a possibility. One thing existing as two things. There is complexity of presence with absence. Stuff is around us all the time that we cannot name. When I communicate with you, it’s not just me talking and it going straight to your ear. It is the exchange that happens between us and the space involved.

DA The light between us.

CM And also between the work. Salmon Rushdie, in his book Haroun and the Sea of Stories, talks about a P2C2E, which is a process too complicated to explain, which I just love. These dots are like the P2C2E, this process too complicated to explain but doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It is still there. I can’t name it. It would be a shame to scientifically put it under a microscope… even though we try to explain it.

DA Like hope.

CM Yes, it is. I have the idea that something exists beyond me. That the world is not just me and the ideas that come from me. I am not wholly in control of these thoughts or ideas or wholly on top of them. It feels kind of liberating to me. I can breathe. Being an autonomous being sounds hard. I don’t want to be in that space. I feel appreciative that there are all these other things that are at play in whatever I do. Things I don’t understand.

DA You are like a shaman. You allow things to happen. It’s a thing that happens. You are an intermediary.

CM I would be cautious to use that language, because I don’t know what it is that I am.

DA Let’s talk about the feathers.
"Osmophonia (The Porosity of Song)"; 2012-2013; clay slip, glaze, & feathers; dimensions variable

Because you have taken the birds’ feathers and made the work enlivened with them, all the feathers are now stuck all over the heads.

CM This piece, the bird traps and the birds on the wall – they started at about the same time.
A few years ago my daughter and I bought bird feeders and put them outside our window. We spent a huge amount of time watching the birds, noticing the birds. At that time, I went into her school and did an art project with the kids about local birds. They drew birds, built birds’ nests. Birds can teach you something. But not in a sentimental way. I can learn something from them, although it might not be possible to make what I learn into a formula. I think this is partly about me being able to gain something from the experience of being with birds, something porous. The work is partly about that and partly about blurring the lines between what is human what is animal.

DA Your heads are really hard and blue.

CM Yes, they are china blue.

DA There is this huge anxiety here.

CM I know that is what some people see in it. And I know sometimes people feel the same anxiety in the piece that is on the opposite side of the wall - "Dysphonia (Mouth Stuffed Full)"… the fur in the mouth. I know they can make people anxious. I am not saying that I make them without knowing that. I think they make people anxious because they are different.

DA No it is not that. It is because of the fur. Fur and feathers are huge. They come from the animals. Creatures. And they are misplaced. And they are not functioning the way...

CM We don’t have problems with going to the grocery store and buying meat that comes from animals.

DA Some people do.

CM Some people do. But we don’t see that as being displaced. It is because it is placed in a different context. It creates a point of difference.

DA Also, it disallows the speech, which would normally be evoked from the mouth. And you have this scribbling, so it is as if whatever was held in the head has now become distorted on the faces, instead of coming through the mouth.

CM You are quite perceptive.
They are meant to disturb but not necessarily sensationalize. I don’t want to disturb for the purpose of sensation; I am interested in art that makes us look at things differently.

DA Like the cow, with the magnifying glass.

(Regurgitation; toy cow, clay, acrylic, paper, ink and synthetic grass on wood shelf; 2008-2013)

CM Yes.

DA Did you make this whole thing?

CM I didn’t make the cow. I made the intestine and constructed the rest of the piece. This (text) is actually my Master’s thesis.

DA That’s funny.

CM The cow is regurgitating. I think academics get really serious. It becomes as if you see everything. When you write a thesis it seems, in a way as if the object and ideas exist on their own. I think, however, there is way to write that is more questioning, but traditionally a thesis is written in a way that is like a statement. It’s meant to be solid so that people can’t poke holes in it. In a way it is quite different from how I see art practice, which is for me a process of questioning, of me engaging questions. I have been trying to find a way for the process of writing to feel more honest. Ten years down the road you might look at what you wrote and decide it doesn’t make sense. So it seems odd to take it so seriously, as if it is the absolute truth.

DA We like to try and figure it out.

CM Yes, I am trying to negotiate and engage with this honesty. At times I have to poke really far in one direction or the other to be able to say… okay it is not quite that. I can say there is a difference between what academic practice of writing has been and what, let’s say, poetic writing is. Those are different forms. One, you tend to participate and engage with. And the other is a much more objective process. You have more distance from the world when you write a thesis. Traditionally, objectivity has been seen as something that is considered valuable in academic writing, only recently has it been questioned.

DA I think your approach, too for me is subjective

CM How can you not be subjective? You are there. It just feels honest to acknowledge that you bring a presence to whatever it is that you engage in.

DA What about this fuzzy furry guy there?

("Articulate Bodies"; 2011; watercolour, acrylic, graphite, pen and thread on paper, 2 x 22" x 30"). He looks like he’s in the midst of blood. And he’s stitched. On top of that. And these... (spots) all are these all organisms?

CM They are something like organisms. If we think of organisms as something that is a molecule, we tend to think of something that is physical, that doesn’t have consciousness. I wouldn’t say they are just biological organisms. They are things that exist that make up the complex world that we are a part of. That is the reason for the title ‘Articulate Bodies’…

DA Sorry to interrupt you. I need to talk about this.

("Symbiophonia"; Pen on paper; 3 x 22" x 30"; 2013)
I have been avoiding it and I don’t know why. I would like to know why I am avoiding it.

CM For me it is different than the other work.

DA The figure has its back to the viewers. And the animal is forefront. So this figure is getting lost in whatever is here. His head is almost in it. What does that mean?

CM It’s called Symbiophonia - phonia has to do with sound. There’s a whole bunch of things going on in this work. I don’t want to present a relationship that is oversimplified. It is about the complexity of our relationship with the world that is around us. I’m trying to show the complexity of the relationship we have with the world and with animals. And that is where the “symbio” comes from. The theory of evolution has often been interpreted as the survival of the fittest, which is based on competition, which emphasizes to some degree the separation of different species. Originally, I don’t know that Darwin wrote it in that way but it is often interpreted as this type of competition, of species against this species, where one species is going to come out on top. There is a writer named Lynn Margulis who writes about evolution as a form of symbiogenesis. She talks about how the smallest parts of us – microbes and protists evolve collaboratively. They are completely dependent on each other. If you look at species from one perspective - they appear to be competing with each other, but if you look at them from a different, more intimate or micro perspective, species evolve through entanglements with each other, it is a collaborative process. So, Symbiophonia is me thinking about language and all the ways we communicate with each other; all the ways we experience and know the world as beings that are intricately entangled.

DA I heard about that before, and I really liked that idea. I feel that idea. I have difficulty with... it is presence and absence at the same time.
if you look at the tethering of the rock, "Small Bird Trap (Learning to Sing)" at the nest, is, to me a reflection of that also, what is happening. That’s to catch birds and this is...

CM To hold on to animals. Yes, there is an element, a question or suggestion of dominance in the piece. And I think there is a question or suggestion in "Following (Rumination)", in the strings that connect or tie down and in (Dysphonia) with the pieces with fur in their mouths. There is a suggestion of dominance in those works. This is where our ethics comes into play. That moment of dominance where, whatever it is we desire, even if it is me not desiring this thing that is in front of me, this cultural other or this animal – it ends up involving some complicated chain that possibly involves dominance.
I like the conversation with you because it makes me more aware of how this is important to the work.

DA I am happy to have been involved.


ba_ble: inarticulations on human-animal relations
Xchanges Gallery
1st February – 24 February 2013
Victoria BC

---

[i] Luce Irigaray: Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist,psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. She is best known for her works Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1977).