Fou Gallery is pleased to announce that the new exhibition MORGAN O’HARA: LIVE TRANSMISSION IN THE DARK will be on view from June 24 to August 12 , 2017. The gallery will present 10 drawings from Morgan O’Hara’s well-known performance art-based LIVE TRANSMISSION series and two site-specific wall drawings that interact with the architectural elements of the gallery’s brownstone space. To create the site-specific works, LIVE TRANSMISSION drawings will be projected on the wall, and O’Hara will direct volunteers to paint the spaces between the projected lines. The opening reception of the exhibition will be held on Saturday, June 24 from 5–8 pm.

O’Hara’s 30-year practice of the LIVE TRANSMISSION series is related to her residency in Italy in 1989 when she was invited by Italian collector Carlo Cattelani to do a commission for his collection. Sitting for hours at dinners with many people and not yet fluent in Italian, she began to make small drawings, tracking the buoyant gestures of the Italian speakers. This small process grew into a 3000-drawing practice over many years.

O’Hara lived 21 years in Italy – Milano, Bergamo and Corneliano Bertario – before returning to New York in 2010. During the exhibition, Fou Gallery will host screenings of three Italian films selected by O’Hara. During the screenings, the artist will watch the film with the audience and create LIVE TRANSMISSION drawings on-site. Screenings will be held on Saturday evenings on July 8, July 22 and August 5, from 8 - 10 pm in the gallery.

For Morgan O’Hara, paper and pencil are both the recording media and the physical manifestation of her conceptual art. Tracking the trajectories of live movements, O’Hara condenses and transmits three-dimensional movement onto the two-dimensional plane of of paper. Following a precise procedure as she observes performances, she draws with sharp pencils in both hands and simultaneously translates movement into lines. The drawings are comparable to recordings made by impersonal mechanical devices. As O’Hara suggests: “I’m trying to track the vitality of movement in real time, in such a way that my personality doesn’t filter it out and I’m not interpreting or emoting. I’m not expressing myself. It goes through my body, so these look like my lines .” (see footnote 1)

Through her sharp, carefully controlled lines and orderly gestures, traces of various movements - whether it’s Larry Miller and his fan performing at Fluxus Festival, Sarah O’Goran removing of yesterday’s makeup, or Ikebana master Ken Katayama arranging flowers  - manifest O’Hara’s primordial nature and immediate concern for life.

The drawings presented in the exhibition are from the Volume VI of MORGAN O’HARA: THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIVE TRANSMISSION, a series of monographs, organized by category,  that document the artist’s works. All of the drawings in the exhibition are based on art performances that have taken place around the world. They recently returned to New York from a retrospective of O’Hara’s works at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile.

About the exhibition

Dates: June 24 – August 12, 2017

Venue: Fou Gallery

Courtesy of the artist and Fou Gallery, for further information please visit www.fougallery.com.