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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, August 11, 2002

Artist opens 'cabinet of curiosities' for mixed-media exhibit

By Victoria Gail-White
Advertiser Art Reviewer

"Eloquent Bouquet," a mixed-media work by Marcia Morse

Gregory Yamamoto •  The Honolulu Advertiser

'Cabinet of Curiosities'

New work by Marcia Morse

'A Brush with Still Life'

Recent works by Helen C. Iaea

Through Aug. 30

10 a.m.-9 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.- 5 p.m. Sundays

The Gallery at Ward Centre

597-8034

'What Was He Thinking?'

Alexandru Preiss

Through Aug. 29

9 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays, 1-4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays

Gallery on the Pali

2500 Pali Highway

Marcia Morse's presence in Hawai'i's art world is pervasive. She has taught printmaking since 1979, first at the University of Hawai'i and for the past 18 years at Honolulu Community College, as well as at Temari and the Academy Art Center at Linekona. She has written art criticism for local newspapers since 1978, jurored art shows, curated art exhibits and written art catalogs. She is a rare combination of respected art scholar and esteemed artist. With numerous one-woman shows, exhibits, awards and as a past recipient of an individual fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she has more than demonstrated her talent in printmaking and papermaking. Her impeccable eye and sensitivity to art materials and the written word are evident in her recent mixed-media works, "Cabinet of Curiosities."

"The title for the show is both ethnographic and anthropologic in context," Morse says. "Voyagers and travellers would bring back a collection of objects from their adventures — tokens from another culture, artifacts from another place and time. The 'cabinet of curiosities' displayed these collections."

Morse collects things not with a purpose in mind, but because she loves them for their own properties: crab claws, shells, maiden-hair fern, wooden boxes, porcupine quills and even sentences. As an invited artist, she wanted to work in a more intimate scale for this exhibit within a theme of things collected and enclosed.

"I wanted to focus on letting the works speak or make themselves known through the mode of putting these odd things (from her collection) together and seeing what happened," she said. Her work in this show falls into three subcategories: small wooden box sculptures, books and slip-cast ceramics.

"Portable Forest" is a small forest of delicate, dried maiden-hair fern in a painted, black-domed wooden box with a mottled graphite finish. "Menage a trois" is a small, peach-colored box on pointed crab-claw feet with crab-claw handles and three crab legs inside. The claws have the same fleshy color as the box, with the tips and horny protrusions accentuated in a darker brown. If you connect the visual with the title, it looks like a complicated and somewhat painful love affair.

The books "were meant to be interactive," Morse said. "You can alternate the sequence and make one page more visible. I see books as sculptural structures — bound or unbound. Played out in this looser structure is the idea of having a sense of form as a whole, but taking it in parts at any given moment."

"Aerial Insights," a book of five separate colored prints attached with linen cord, hangs from five thin Plexiglas rods resting in a U-shaped plexistand. The patterns and colors of earth in this above-ground artist's picture book have the power to tell their own story.

Morse's slip-cast ceramic and vellum "Eloquent Bouquet" incorporates a part of her collection of lyrical sentences. White, doll-sized arms reach out of a white ceramic box that suspends vellum strips with writing. Looking closer, they read," they lingered in the darkness ... they drifted through time, intent ... they were everywhere and nowhere ... they circled round one another ... they did not wander anymore" and so on. "There is something endearing and poignant about little hands and arms," said Morse. I agree.

Raised in Hawai'i by creative parents who encouraged her in the visual arts (her mother was a professional musician and her father had a background in journalism), she is a graduate of Punahou School, Harvard and Stanford. Originally planning a career in the social and psychological sciences, she connected passionately with the printmaking medium while living in South America. Her love affair with papermaking followed. Fortunately for all of us, she has never let them go.

• • •

Installed above Marcia Morse's artworks are the watercolor paintings of Helen C. Iaea, a member of the co-op Gallery at Ward Centre. "A Brush with Still Life" is a collection of still lifes, mostly florals and fruits, deftly painted in gentle strokes of warm and cool colors. The subject matter is not unusual, but Iaea's rendering of "White Roses" is an enchanting use of whites and light.

• • •

If you want to know what Alexandru Preiss is thinking, visit his installation of 32 visual thoughts communicated through the medium of photo collage and digital printmaking at the Gallery on the Pali. This award-winning, Romanian-born multimedia artist has exhibited his work locally and internationally.

Over the past 30 years, Preiss has amassed thousands of images and uses digital technology to connect them in ways that express what is important to him, the condition of humanity and the state of the world we live in.

"I have a very good visual memory," he writes in his artist statement. "What I see now is just part of reality; to every situation, I bring ideas and connections from the past that define the whole experience."

The 14-by-11-inch artworks, all framed with Plexiglass and clips, are hung lower than the viewing plane to cut down on the glare from the gallery windows.

The "Profiling" series, "The Quiet Neighbor," and "Peace Offering" can be disturbing in their use of fragmented body parts superimposed with slaughtered animal carcasses, flames and skeletons. "I didn't do those pieces for the shock value," Preiss said. "I think it is important to talk about what is going on in the world, to initiate a dialogue."

Viewing this exhibit is much like going to a movie. There is action, violence, beauty and humor in the compositions. And they make you wonder.

"I Didn't Mean to Scare You," a photo collage of a toy dinosaur standing in an open entry doorway highlighted by a cyan-tinted twilight, was inspired by a story that Preiss read as a child.

In the story, a small boy dreams of being a sailor. Eventually, after his education, he becomes a captain of a ship. However, the moment he sails out onto the ocean, a monster appears — and continues to appear throughout his naval career. Finally, after retiring at age 80, the captain rows a dinghy out to meet the monster, alone. He asks why it has followed him all his life. The monster answers that all this time it has been trying to give him a diamond. The captain dies with the diamond inside him.

Preiss has created "rooms" in some of these works: visual environments of dialogue. Some of these rooms would benefit by enlarging them considerably (to 36 by 40 inches, for instance) because they demand more of our attention. They are evocative of the paintings of Rene Magritte.

"What Time Does the War Start?" is a transcendent work wherein the medium becomes almost musical in its use of color and composition. Pink-red walls with clocks, a burning tree, a doorway that opens to the sky and a dove in flight herald the complexity of peacekeeping.

Preiss's work juxtaposes opposing images to achieve emotional and psychological reactions. He is not offering any solutions. His work is visionary.