MOTHER
The Heart wants what it wants - or else it does not care -
Anders Hamilton | Jenny Morgan
November 4 - December 16, 2023
Opening reception: Saturday, November 4, 3-5 pm
Mother Gallery is pleased to present The Heart wants what it wants - or else it does not care - a two person exhibition featuring sculptures by Anders Hamilton and oil paintings by Jenny Morgan. The Heart wants what it wants - or else it does not care - will be on view from November 4 through December 16, 2023. Mother is located at 1154 North Avenue in Beacon, NY.
A spirit never dies, it’s said. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, so say the laws of physics. Death isn’t the end, it’s merely a transformation. The Heart wants what it wants - or else it does not care - wrote Emily Dickinson. The heart is what lets us live in the end.
The energy around life in this moment feels centered in death. Plague remains, suffering sustained, trauma unprocessed. The ghosts of ourselves sit uncomfortably behind the husks of our present shells, after all radical change never unfolds gently. There’s certainly been a transition of energy in recent times, more and more vapors of those who were once here. Yet, the structures around us look and feel the same as ever before.
But indeed, art is humanity, it's the vernacular of expression, of the universal, that a complex matrix of morality lives inside us all. In a dehumanizing world, through these portals are reminders of our shared condition. Art doesn’t let the spirit die. It offers space for it to radiate. Hark back to Leonor Fini, who said, “[art] it is an activity connected to the ancient origins.” It’s as universal and elemental to ourselves as we are.
Through the act of painting, as Jenny Morgan experiences, evokes the lingering spirit of her sitter and of the familiar-unknown places of her landscape work. Morgan herself is deeply aware of the vitality that emanates from her painting. “I don't know how psychic energy moves through, but something exists,” she says. Intention isn’t often considered in the making of a painting, process instead takes precedence. There’s a psychic trust between the painter and the canvas; it’s a space for Morgan to commune and communicate with the ineffable, the unclear, the primal, where the mind meets reality or doesn’t. Make note that Morgan isn’t painting the ineffable, rather in the act is a transference of energy from the artist. Morgan only paints people with whom she shares a connection, and sitting for Morgan is an exchange: the gift of being seen, and the trust of the sitter’s spirit to Morgan.
Whether the eyes beneath the stairs or amid the fabric folds in The Slow Backward Ascent, or embedded into rock, such as in Gently Tread to the Hollow Edge, the presence of the other side can’t be ignored. If Morgan’s tableau’s feel psychically charged, it’s because they are. “The spirit of the thing” near literally. The vibrational charge of a person or place’s presence exists and exudes from a work of art made of them, made by a human behind the tool. Morgan’s paintings are a reminder of what an appeal to the cosmic beauty of humanity can capture. “It is not in the role of an artist to worry about life—to feel responsible for creating a better world,” wrote Agnes Martin, who captured the melody of stillness.
It’s the same cool-edged Martin who also offered: “Beauty is the mystery of life.” The lingering reminders of memories, sensations, remembrances and wafting touches; the mind pulling out the archive of itself, the persistent imprint of a life lived and a person inhabited by themselves, however that carries through is that mysterious beauty. Some things can’t be explained, but it doesn’t mean they can’t be held as truth.
Just as memory helps unlock the mystery of beauty, forgetting is an act of courage in producing truth. When John Cage said to Philip Guston, “When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.” One’s own truth.
For Anders Hamilton, influence is best avoided. Instead, it’s the earth that calls out that Hamilton embalms in ceramic slip to offer his Obelisks. Obelisks, remember, are the Egyptian symbolic markers of sacred earth, a petrified ray from the sun god of Ra that then carried through other civilizations like the Romans and the French Enlightenment monarchs to demarcate power and prestige. But unlike other monuments of war and dominance, Obelisks inherent relation to the sun tempers the brute masculinity, instead its dependence on the sun ever softening its own intrusion into the sky. And together the sun and obelisk chart time.
From a simple stick, Hamilton’s artistic practice formed—a found stick in New Mexico that he struck into earth, which then served as a sundial sparked a curiosity that formed an artistic inquiry. Hamilton has always maintained a ceramic practice since his teens, but this simple stick sundial was a turning point into sculpture, removing the function of his clay-throwing and instead rooting himself into the cradle of creation. For Hamilton, it’s not art history he’s contending with, it’s the very spirit of the cosmos and the cycle of life and nature.
Hamilton’s diminutive ceramic totems begin with a foraged fossil of the forest, a memento of place—twigs, leaves, stems, flowers—that he then dips in slip and coasts with layers of plaster, resins and fiber. “I refer to it as cremation,” says Hamilton. From there, the corpse gets dressed up with glazing and other adorning processes, including for this new body of work, rare earth oxides, which when fired in a kiln take on translucent tones that shift with the light. Light a candle, flip a switch, tie back curtains to unveil lavender, grays, greens—the spirit of the material revealing the many sides of itself to differing eyes.
That spirit prompts Hamilton to consider his works in “an otherworldly territory.” The ghost of the earth ever alive in the elements of surprise. What grounds the sculpture’s base is what Hamilton calls an “egg,” a ceramic bowl-like basin wherein the sculpture is planted. Death and life, timelessly entangled together, again. For Hamilton, where in his works, he can “project human experience and the human life scale lifespan onto something so meaningless,” there’s a reminder that the meaning is found in the spirit of the thing, in the way that spirit is received and embraced by others, especially ourselves.
Because in the end, as Helen Frankenthaler, “Art has a will of its own,” whose color diffusions yearned for transcendence. It can capture the spirit of a person or place, be made from the spirit of earth, be of something elemental and fundamental and still be its own contained universe. Art is its own truth; but it is never without the vibrations and vitality of its maker, and its subject, locked in an infinite energy exchange. Art is never without the secrets of the universe; nor the beginnings or ends. —Julie Baumgardner