What happens when a weaver and a painter exhibit together? In the case of mutual admirers Christina Forrer and Rebecca Morris, the effect is quite stunning.
About the Show
“Parker Gallery is proud to present a two-person exhibition with Los Angeles-based artists Christina Forrer and Rebecca Morris. The exhibition features new works by Forrer together with paintings by Morris executed over the last three years. Friends and mutual fans, this exhibition marks the first time the artists have exhibited alongside each other, bringing together two idiosyncratic practices.
In Forrer’s new tapestries, myriad scenes can be found throughout dense compositions of topsy-turvy topography navigated by characters in action. Heroic feats, along with moments of joy and suffering, establish the artist’s mythical worlds. Characters transform from one being to another, across metaphysical boundaries. Woven from the bottom up, Forrer’s narrative tapestries unfold from one horizontal register to the next, creating layers of legible space that emphasize the immediacy of the image.
Morris’s inventive abstract paintings, by contrast, build space with the intent to slow the eye. Employing many different gestures within a single work, the artist approaches the canvas as a problem to be solved, applying paint in an additive process guided by openness and experimentation. Patchwork fields of vibrant and nuanced color map out alternately dense and loose fields that characterize the structure of her paintings. Colliding contrasting forms, Morris’s rich vocabulary of shape and line establishes constant motion and perpetual rhythm.
Each artist approaches their work from an incomplete vantage point, located somewhere within the composition, rarely in view of the total picture. For Forrer, weaving on the loom means that a work is always in sequential progress, never fully revealing itself until it is taken off the loom. And Morris often paints her canvases on the floor, lying atop an elevated bridge, inches from the canvas, focusing on specific areas before being able to zoom out to reveal the total picture. The limitations of sight are intrinsic to their processes, treated less as a disadvantage than as an opportunity for risk-taking, tackled inch-by-inch, one section at a time.”