An Artist Conversation: Ree Morton

Описание: This conversation took place on July 16, 2020 online during the final week of the exhibition run of Ree Morton: The Plant That Heals May Also Poison at ICA LA.

The work of Ree Morton continues to inspire many artists since her untimely death in 1977 at the age of 41. Join Los Angeles-based artists Jade Gordon, Katie Grinnan, and Evan Holloway for an online Zoom conversation about Morton and her legacy. Moderated by ICA LA Goodworks Executive Director Anne Ellegood.

The exhibition Ree Morton: The Plant That Heals May Also Poison can be viewed online at Virtual ICA LA.

About the artists:
Jade Gordon (b. 1975, Santa Rosa, CA) is a founding member of the art collective, My Barbarian. Her collaborative work uses performance to theatricalize social problems and imagine ways of being together. Exploring the legacies of feminist theory, performance art history, political theater and social movements, Gordon makes plays, costumes, masks, puppets, and videos. She has a concurrent collaborative practice with Megan Whitmarsh, creating videos, performances, installation and events which engage the community.

Evan Holloway (b. 1967, Whittier, CA) has identified with Los Angeles since the beginning of his career integrating a distinct West Coast art-historical tradition. His hands-on approach to sculpture evolved when the dominant discourse in art had moved away from presenting objects in space as a site of aesthetic investigation. What he describes as an “analog counterrevolution” is a one-man paean to the belief that stand-alone sculpture can be both conceptually complex and accessible to a general audience. Holloway creates objects suffused with a prickly beauty that is both personal and universal.

Katie Grinnan (b. 1970, Richmond, Virginia) makes work that stems from the body, specifically the relationship between visual, kinesthetic and cognitive experience, and the way these different knowledge systems affect one’s perception of reality and sense of self. Most recently her focus has incorporated various states of consciousness such as meditation and dreaming. Many of her sculptures use performed gestures as a system of movement. These mapped motion systems are often in conversation with mapped data systems from different ideological frameworks, ranging from astrology charts to EEG diagrams. These diagrams are translated into instruments, sounds, scores, and choreographies favoring experiential and somatic interpretations of the information.