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Tall Sassafras Slice I, by Alison Moritsugu If you would like to link your website to this feature, requests may be directed to editors@orionsociety.org OrionOnline's features change regularly. These readings will not be archived on this site, nor will they be repeated. If you would like to be notified when features like this change, click here: FREE E-Updates |
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ALISON MORITSUGU: THE LANDSCAPE WITHIN In her ongoing series of log paintings, Alison Moritsugu uses art and art history to examine the past while raising questions about belief, nature and national destiny. Her earlier work examined the contrivances found in the landscape paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries. These landscapes, by artists such as Bierstadt and Church, were deeply rooted in the political constructs of the time and depicted the land as a bountiful Eden, a limitless frontier, almost beckoning man's imminent conquest. By painting directly onto the cut surface of logs, she takes the landscape out of its familiar context, contrasts the painted image with real wood and bark, and asks us to question our own ideas of nature and artifice.
In her new body of work, Moritsugu examines how we view landscapes, how we take them in and "read" them. Her focus, this time, is on the process of seeing more specifically, how we have been taught to view landscapes through "European spectacles". The European construct, following the Grand Style of Claude and Turner, dictates that clouds, mountains, rocks and trees all be orchestrated so as to present themselves to the viewer. We stand where God once stood, we survey the expanse before us with a dominant gaze, our peripheral vision catches the far reaches of the horizon which, often times, is a very distinct line separating earth and sky. Moritsugu's three tall paintings (two over 8 feet tall - see image at left) on diagonally-cut sassafras tree slices deny all this. Although they are rendered in a style reminiscent of the European tradition, they read like a Chinese scroll using compositional elements of Chinese landscape paintings. We cannot take the whole piece in with a cursory glance. We can only read it by traveling through it; we can only see it by being "in" it. Moritsugu has said, "I have always been interested in creating landscapes that are little difficult to read, in other words, not viewable in the traditional way taught to us by hundreds of years of European art and art history. As much as I try to make the paintings beautiful, an homage to the log on which they are painted, there always seems to be a tension created when viewing the works.The cursory glance, the dominant gaze does not work here. Whether the view has been fragmented into hundreds of logs sections, or whether other non-European styles are introduced, the point here is to get the viewer to recognize how often he sees in a pre-disposed path following the well-trod lines of European dominance." Alison Moritsugu has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships and residencies including ones from the MacDowell Colony, The Bronx Museum of the Arts' "AIM Program", Yaddo, and the Cite' Internationale des Arts in Paris. She was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Washington University School of Fine Arts in St. Louis, Missouri, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Visual Arts in New York. She currently lives in upstate New York. This is the artist's second solo exhibition at Littlejohn Contemporary. For further information please contact Monroe Lemay or Jacquie Littlejohn at 212.980.2323. Home | E-mail this Page to a Friend |
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