Arts Sorcery on Leverington Avenue
Roxborough-Manayunk's Spellbinding Artist, Kate Moran
by F.D. Walsh
Even the simplest summary of Kate Moran's credentials can't be
accomplished in one breath. The Roxborough resident is a sculptor,
painter, photographer, wood carver, metal worker, ceramics firer, school
bus driver, teacher . . . she even finds time for sleep. Moran instructs
two seminars at the Academy of Fine Arts on North Broad Street and
teaches a 3-D class at Arcadia University. She has also won the coveted
1993-1994 Pew Foundation Grant for Photography.
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| "We
are faced with the longevity of an object, the cause of its
being internalized, but which is more appealing to a working
class in its practicality." Photo, Frank Walsh |
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"Kate is one of the few artists who can work cross-discipline
successfully," said Becky Kerlin, owner of Gallery Joe. The
photography and sculpture of Moran, whose first Gallery Joe show was in
December, 2001, are shopped daily by Kerlin.
Reserved, if not absolutely reticent, the hermetical bent of Moran
surely could otherwise speak in droves about her huge body of multimedia
work.
Instead, the artificer says "I think through my hands."
Kerlin adds, "Kate is quite an independent spirit."
Moran's sorcery scares up mixed media with everyday objects. Windows,
skylights, doors, portals, vents, fanlights, pulleys, car parts do not
escape her studio. This sorceress of the Schuylkill is chattering
incessantly on the picture plane. But the stunning redhead is really
quite taciturn in person.
"But she's really quite talkative," said Kerlin. "One
of Kate's favorite topics is critiquing her students' works in both
written and verbal form. Kate believes passionately in the creative
process and will talk at length about it with the young people she
guides."
Moran's style of exhibiting photographs of her sculptures in motion
is intended to estrange the viewer. "She even withholds many of her
sculptures from public exhibit," says Kerlin.
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"It
would be boring if you understood what you were looking at and
why." Photo, Frank Walsh. |
Such photographs, as "Car Door," depicting the painted
metal replica of the car part she sculpted, take their place.
"It would be boring if you understood what you were looking at
and why," says this conjurer of Leverington Avenue, who never
bothering to exhibit the replica she sculpted, exhibited the photograph
at Gallery Joe's in its place.
Another photographed sculpture depicted in motion, "Chest of
Drawers," shows fabric peeking from a drawer, while the furniture
floats in mid-air. One could argue that Moran is trying to do
pictorially what Bertold Brecht had tried to do theatrically with the
dramatist's employment of "verfremdung," the alienation of the
spectator. However, Moran by comparison, seems committed to freeing her
audience from grievous thematic turmoil. The viewer tries on
"Easter Market" for size, compelled by the shrewd use of Line.
The drawing depicts a dead elk, rendered in ink, ball point pen and
lithograph pen on masonite. The viewer's eye opens inwardly upon the
vast, crepuscular landscape, a corporeal treatment of the subconscious
in mixed media. His confusion grows. But there is nothing to understand
beyond realizing that the existence of confusion is an inescapably sad
but nevertheless liberating reality. Moran's pictures, like life, are an
enigma.
"Kate's drawings are just as heart-wrenching as her
sculptures," says Kerlin.
The results do not result in the so-called 'Collective Unconscious'
but an organic, animating Gestalt. Confusion, sayeth the Buddha, is good
when it is embraced.
"I'm attempting to duplicate a kind of sensibility; a physical
sensibility," Moran says.
Gallery Joe markets Moran's "Untitled," a photograph
available as a Silver Print. Depicted is a sculpted spiral in motion, an
archetypal example of Moran's technique of positioning a
three-dimensional and animated piece structurally at odds with itself.
The spiral appears at first glance to be naive and toy-like, but its
blurred contours plus the subtitle, "From the Disc Behind and
Before," connote that a second-guessing of the subject's structural
purity is afoot. Is the natural state of a form to be determined at rest
or in motion, asked the Futurists of yore?
"Whether you are comfortable or can't place what you are looking
at, Kate is still a very honest artist," insists Kerlin.
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Untitled living room decor.
Photo, Frank Walsh. |
The irony is even better exemplified in "Nine Dolls Full of
Color who Understand Touch," an animated installation, which has
enjoyed interstate travel, mention in lectures and illustrations in
publications. Once revealing their existential merits-- the dolls' paint
is chipped and the figures are marching out of step, the cosmetic jading
of their innocence becomes figuratively emboldened. Sentimentality is
contradicted by banality. Reality becomes at once fascinating but is
nevertheless terminally listless. Contradictions are the rub.
"This is Kate's way," explains Kerlin. "Resultantly,
the art is strongly emotional because of how she works the inner theme,
in addition to laboring over the outer appearance."
The histrionic effect reassures while disarming the mind of the
observer--- nothing dangerous or upsetting is displayed. No bitter
aftertaste. The aesthetic experience is easeful without accompanying the
loss of any intellectual depth or emotional association. Moran insists
that the meaning in the piece, in fact, may very well have slipped the
viewer's mind. Nobody is held hostage. The viewer is free to go. Collect
$200 as you pass "go."
"This physical sensibility is attained by concentrating the
ideas and subjects of my art and craft into a dimension where they can
easily fit into somebody's head," Moran explains.
"Her work is quite a studious and liberating experience,"
promises Kerlin, who insists that none of the distortions of the images
have been manipulated via a computer or in the darkroom.
Moran has won prizes from the Leeway Foundation twice, respectively,
the Works on Paper Fellowship in 2000 and the Excellence in Photography
award. The organization is dedicated to women artists. The Pennsylvania
Council of the Arts has crowned her four times, granting a Visual Arts
Fellowship in 1993, the Interdisciplinary Arts Fellowship in 1996 and
the Works on Paper Fellowship in 2000 and 2002 (the 2000 "Works on
Paper" prize was jointly bequeathed with Leeway).
"Monster Truck," a photograph of a wind-up toy, is an
impression of another found object in motion. Here, the contradiction is
puerile mirth at odds with the physical volatility of movement. Moran's
work (which she refers to as "ingredients," of the human
condition) is impressed upon the perceptions simultaneously in the
overall experience of a pictorial "surface tension," which she
says consists of, "funniness and sadness." Motion of the toy
changes our understanding of "toy." That our childhood is
over, is a traumatic realization.
"Kate works in isolation," Kerlin enlightens. "She
strives to achieve great emotion in her work. This takes a lot out of
her."
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| Untitled.
The Moran living room 'gurney'. Photo, Frank Walsh |
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There are folk elements at play, also. Among the untitled linear
sculptures sitting in Moran's livingroom, is a piece whose incorporation
of shadows is akin to the surrealistic, open geometry of Alberto
Giacometti and resembles the die cast "high wire" clowns of
antique mobiles. A weathered baby doll, suspended from twine is attached
to a length of metal, illusorily drawn through two pulleys, striking an
inverted 'V' shape. Moran refers to the piece as a steel
"gurney," which, she says, "merges the grotesque and the
ideal." The fixture, anchored to a chair, bears an irrepressible
heirloom quality, fused with the same accidental, artistic endowment
which Marcel DuChamp discovered while juxtaposing the steering column of
a bicycle with a stool. The viewer, simultaneously a "folk"
participant and an estranged outsider, joins the war of phenomenology
versus idealism, subjectivity versus gritty purity, folk art versus
surrealism.
"We are faced with the longevity of an object, the cause of its
being internalized, but is more appealing to a working class in its
practicality," Moran says.
"I am now conceiving a 'toy- theater' with 'shadow
puppetry'," Moran promises, guaranteeing that the union of pure,
childlike wonderment and the complexities caused by a rich, artistic,
multi-media facility shall be inescapably ominous.
Moran's paradoxical alchemy is on display at Gallery Joe, at 302 Arch
Street in Old City. Additional information can be obtained by calling
the gallery at (215) 592-7752 or by visiting the gallery's website at www.galleryjoe.com
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