Locky Morris – A Week in Goals

Locky Morris—A Week in Goals

Locky Morris A Week in GoalsPublished in an edition of 2,000© October 2013 / All rights reserved

Who made you the centre of the universe? © Declan Sheehan 2013Photography by Paola BernardelliImage, p.26 courtesy of mother's tankstationDesigned by Joe Coll, www.joecoll.comPrinted by Impress Printing Works, DublinPaper: Olin Regular Natrual White 100g/m2

Fonts: Akkurat & Leitura Display

Acknowledgements:Locky Morris would like to thank the following people: Mary, Dolly, Edan and Éva Líle, Uncle Eddie, Declan, Paola, Joe, Charles, Colm, John, John, Joe and all the crew, Danielle, Ami, Linda, Sandra, John, Tony and Eamon, Hawks, Rory, Jes, Graeme, Joanne, Stewarty, James, Charlie and the scouts, John, Ryan and Deano's.

www.lockymorris.org

3 October 2013–13 December 2013

116 Beechwood AveCreggan Derry BT48 9LS

Opening Times:Tuesday–Saturday11:00am–5:30pm

Supported byGasyard Development TrustTriax CommunityEngagement Programme

Locky Morris—A Week in Goals

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A W E E K I N G O A L S

White Dog and Seat 2010C-print on aluminium under matt acrylic glass158cm x 119 cm

exhibition entrance, left

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L O C K Y M O R R I S

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The Last 2010Laser crystal photo frame,foam lining, adapted shelf12.4 x 9.5 x 12 cm

detail, left

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Michelangelo's House 2013Painted MDF pedestal display case, rotating photo cube, C-prints300 x 300 x 1200 cm

detail

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Take Two 2013Led light bar RGB, mini box speakers,two channel audioDimensions variable

also over page

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Day of the Rat 2010Ultra slim LED light boxDuratran print180 x 120 x 4 cm

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Hairpiece 2003–2013 ongoingEmpty tubs of hair dressing pomade,acrylic basketball display cases, glueDimensions variable

detail, right

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Ringfort and donuts 2013C-print on aluminium under matt acrylic glass83.6 x 125 cm

Drainpipe Shot 2013Video installationDuration 5 mins 4 secsDimensions variable

over page

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Who made you thecentre of the universe?

Declan Sheehan

The artist Locky Morris, in a space next to Deano’s

Barbers on Beechwood Avenue in Creggan, has constructed

an exhibition. And before we commit to exploring this

exhibition, this compact world of devices, objects,

pictures and sounds, it should be asked what pleasure,

what knowledge, what feeling, could any of these devices,

objects, pictures and sounds advance to us?

Regardless of his substantial and international record

as a contemporary artist exhibiting in Berlin, London,

New York, Locky Morris is still rightly known as a ‘local artist’

in Creggan. So for his show here in Creggan—where we

know ‘where he comes from’, his background, his context—

this recognition gives us an almost familial attachment to

his work. And this sense of recognition or identification is

made even more apparent for us because Locky Morris is

an artist whose ‘everyday’ life is commonly the ‘matter’ or

‘material’ of his art, and we know from within our own lives

the ‘stuff’ of everyday life that surrounds and grounds his

work and is transformed within it. There is the encounter

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as son et lumiere through the repeated journey, at once

both intimate and public, of the same ‘school run’ drive

repeated across a seven year gap for a first and second

daughter Take Two; the display as museological artefact

of school uniform detritus from that iconic familial memory

of the first day of school From Day One; or the transition to

gallery object of an episode of deflated anticipation in the

image of a holiday visit to Michelangelo’s home (closed for

refurbishment) in Italy Michelangelo’s House (in progress).

With all this in place then, we can commit to looking

at his exhibition in Creggan, anticipating a sense of

recognition and identification, and with the pleasures

of seeing everyday events and those kind of random—

everyday moments of the chance connections of things, all

modified, heightened and transformed with the artist’s wit

into ‘daily epiphanies’—to use the artist’s own phrase—

that spark moments of reflection and that open up for us

different ways of seeing the world.

But as well as this response, there are probably

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endless responses to the artist’s exhibition that could

be made.

What if, for example, we are actively repositioned with

regard to our responses to the art of Locky Morris?

What if we do not foreground the moments of epiphany

within those familial or everyday contexts which we may

recognise?

What if we do not accept those instants of inspiration

as primary clues to some de facto ‘meaning’?

What if, with regard to the ‘construction’ of meanings,

those epiphanies are viewed as simply one part of a process,

a background or conception of an idea—then followed and

revised by the production—and then revised again by our

encounter with the artwork.

So is it possible then to concentrate upon those

possible meanings constructed within the devices, objects,

pictures and sounds that make up the compact world of

a space next to Deano’s Barbers on Beechwood Avenue in

Creggan, where Locky Morris has constructed an exhibition?

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Although the argument presented here may have

reached some kind of fork in the road, the answer again

is ‘no’. To look for ‘meanings’ within these devices, objects,

pictures and sounds is as wayward a path as looking for

‘meanings’ in the epiphanies. That wayward process of

even looking for ‘meanings’ reduces our encounters with

artworks to the limited horizons of rationality, the closed

worlds of cause and effect—it is always delimiting and

reductive, and always the worst path to take. We have to

accept our status as relative ‘outsiders’ to the lives of these

devices, objects, pictures and sounds—our framework as

not one of identification but rather one of estrangement.

What does it mean to even attempt to think about

the ‘lives’ of these devices, objects, pictures and sounds

that Locky Morris has constructed? Is it even possible?

How can this be any kind of coherent process?

One route could perhaps be identified in some

lines from a recent interview with the film director (and

nascent painter) Steven Soderbergh at vulture.com for

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New York Magazine, where he said of his approach to

painting, “I’m always curious to hear how something was

made—though I have no interest in why an artist did

something, or what his work means. Like with Jackson

Pollock: I’m always interested in what kind of paint and

canvas he used, I just don’t want to know what he meant.

You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re

not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.”

What processes or frameworks would ‘chop the art

down to fit your mind’ as Soderbergh warns?

What processes or frameworks can ‘expand the mind’

as Soderbergh directs?

Those devices, objects, pictures and sounds developed

by Locky Morris which each themselves function like

little acts of engagement in some kind of oppositional

relationship. These devices, objects, pictures and sounds

have been tagged with their points of reference, such as

those daily epiphanies with which the artist is identified.

They collapse multiple contrary forces into singular objects

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and they are little constructed scenarios where the force

of non-rational thought engages with the process of

considered fabrication.

An example: the image Day of the Rat—the work is

a large print of a photograph of the view chanced upon

by the artist through an upstairs window in the artist’s

mother’s home, on the day that the artist, his young

daughter, his mother, his brother, were all ensconced in the

upstairs room while a rat catcher was at work downstairs.

The image Day of the Rat is also a psychogeographical case

study, which captures the precise laws and specific effects

of the urban environment in the emotions and behaviors

imposed on the viewer by one single urban view, with

multiple emotional and biographical registers of private

and public, enclosed and open, concrete and barbed wire

prison-like walled structure and a natural, wooded vista.

And while these narrative, social and quasi-biographical

registers all exist in the work, the work Day of the Rat is also

an exemplar of dynamic mark-making, pattern-forming,

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and shape-making on a flat picture plane made by multiple

levels of colour, form and tone made visible or obscure

interacting across various layers of distance from the

camera lens.

What else to say?

There is an engagement in work by Locky Morris with

multiple modes of thought—biographical, conceptual,

emotional, physical, visceral, auditory: it is at some

considerable and irreducible distance from being exclusively

biographical. As part of a core, significant, and very dynamic

level of engagement, it is accurate that Locky Morris the

artist is at one and the same time both an object and subject

of the work—an object upon which the work reflects as

well as the subject which constructs the work. But rather

than this framework delimiting the work or constructing

some fixed centre to the work, this interplay of subject

and object can bring to mind the seer-like ungrammatical,

non-rational, untranslatable statements Je est un autre &

On me pense of French poet Rimbaud, (roughly translatable

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as “I is an other’ and ‘I am thought / something thinks me’)

which remain to some degree unknowable, speculative,

unfixed and intangible. And if there is through an encounter

with Locky Morris’ work some kind of possible echo of the

contradictory elements of Rimbaud’s engagement with

the self or the ‘I’, there is equally an encounter with themes

from multiple strands of absurdist literature, from Alfred

Jarry’s world of Pataphysics, which imagines a science

where play, untruth and error have usurped the hegemonic

rule of the true, rational and order; from some degree of

conflict with the rational in the performativity of the self

and the ‘I’ and the ‘other’ in Beckett, for example in Happy

Days in which the character Winnie explodes in barely

controlled fury “What does it mean? he says—What's it

meant to mean?—and so on—lot more stuff like that—

usual drivel—Do you hear me? He says—I do, she says,

God help me—What do you mean, he says, God help you?

… And you, she says, what's the idea of you, she says,

what are you meant to mean?”; from Artaud’s incendiary

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explosions of the irrational, the performance and fluidity

of self, and engagement with the detritus and abject within

the everyday—if the artist Locky Morris engages with

antacids, chewed fingernails, we are some distance towards

Artaud’s incendiary acclamation “Là où ça sent la merde, ça

sent l'être” (“There where it smells of shit, it smells of being.”)

There are as yet multiple unexplored paths—and

unexpected connections—in the compact world of devices,

objects, pictures and sounds constructed by Locky Morris.

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From Day One 2008Illuminated glass display case, carpet, crumpled card—child's shirt collar insertDimensions variable, approx. 63.5 x 63.5 x 68 cm

image courtesy of mother's tankstation

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On High 2012C-print on aluminium plate, pigmy lightdetail 30.3 x 53.6 x 6 cm

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Daughter 2013C-print on aluminium under matt acrylic glass84 x 56 cm

Acid Free 2007–2009Empty Rennie packaging (antacid medication), 35mm slide trays, linkable wall lights, improvised brackets

over page

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A Week in Goals 2013Fridge door, C-prints, fridge magnet,photo frames, lightDimensions variable

Locky Morris was born in Derry City, Northern Ireland,

where he continues to live and work. He has been exhibiting

nationally and internationally since the mid 1980s. Recent

solo projects include Me and my Shadow, Mannheimer

Kunstverein, Germany; From Day One, Mother's Tankstation,

Dublin and This Then, The Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.

Group exhibitions include, The Walls that Divide Us, Apexart

in New York City; All Humans Do, the Model, Sligo and White

Box Gallery, NYC; What Became Of The People We Used To Be,

Tulca Festival of Visual Arts, Galway.

His early work was shown in the British Art Show—

New North and Strongholds at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool,

while also exhibiting in a wide range of spaces in his local

neighbourhood—such as disused bookmakers, community

centres and vacant premises. Forthcoming exhibitions

include Dead On, a Void Sites Artists' Garden project in Derry

City and Invisible Violence at Artium, Vitoria, The Model, Sligo,

and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade.

Declan Sheehan is an independent curator for various

projects including Holywell Trust, Arts Council of Ireland

Visual Arts Curator Residency 2013, and the City of Culture

2013 projects BT Portrait of a City, Resonance FM @ Void,

and Picturing Derry.

www.lockymorris.org

Locky Morris – A Week in Goals

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