Liz Tran: Matriarchs and Daughters Dream Oceans of Braille December 9, 2022 to January 6, 2023 Homme DC 2000 L ST NW Washington, DC 20036 US
Morton Fine Art, in collaboration with Homme DC, is pleased to present Matriarchs and Daughters Dream Oceans of Braille, an exhibition of polychromatic inkblot prints and Heirloom (2022), a new 17-foot wall-mounted installation, by artist Liz Tran. Matriarchs and Daughters Dream Oceans of Braille will be on view by appointment from December 9, 2022 to January 6, 2023 at Homme DC’s Washington, D.C. space (2000 L ST NW).
Liz Tran Baby Father, 201924 x 24 in. Mixed media on panel Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist
Inspired by early memories of the artist being administered Rorschach tests — a psychological evaluation of mental health and trauma through associative responses to inkblots — Tran transforms and transports the familiar monochromatic prints into a world of vibrant, technicolor panels that explore the nature of viewer subjectivity. Featuring work from her Mirror and Cosmic Circle series, Matriarchs and Daughters Dream Oceans of Braille is an explosion of colorful dots, circles, blot, and splashes that accumulate on the panel and create a thickened impasto.
Varying her compositions from symmetrical renderings–like a Rorschach print–to others more liberally abstracted, Tran’s works challenge the notion of a correct way to view art. Like the well-known psychological test, Tran’s art performs an introspective function in which the viewer’s interpretation is self-reflexive and can facilitate self-knowledge.
Liz Tran – Heirloom, 2022 Mixed media fiber collage installation 198 x 53 in. Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist
Lovingly sewn by her quilt-making mother, with whom Tran often collaborates, Heirloom encapsulates fabric culled from voyages, memories and installations created around the world. Tran views Heirloom as an homage to her artistic practice and a tribute to the women who came before her. From the curtains of a circus tent, an oversized fiber womb encased in a vintage trailer or a space suit onesie–each piece of fabric contains a distinct story.
“As I found myself delving into the history of my own mental health, I began to simultaneously study perception and subjectivity both in visual art and psychology,” said Tran. “What do we bring to what we see? The viewer’s experience of my work is completely different than my own, yet that experience is equally valid. Is what we see simply a reflection of our self?”
Liz Tran Mirror 8, 202054 x 27 in. Mixed media on panel Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist
Opening the door into a meditative and healing atmosphere, Matriarchs and Daughters Dream Oceans of Braille actively encourages personal interpretation and projections of meaning. Through a form of abstraction that combines precision and instinct, Tran’s joyful works imagine dreamlike surfaces to question the nature of abstraction and our responses to visual stimuli, whether that be art on the white walls of a gallery or observations of planets and stars circling overhead.
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Materiel Remains : Consider this a blueprint, a series of blueprints. A solo exhibition of new work by ETO OTITIGBE May 28th – June 28th, 2022
Contact the gallery for viewing by appointment, price list, additional information and acquisition.(202) 628-2787 (call or text) info@mortonfineart.com
Shadows, 2022, 36″x27″, aluminum and acrylic paint mounted on wood panel
About Materiel Remains
I construct speculative objects that echo within a residual future and the reminiscent present. These objects interrupt urban spaces, appearing to be foreign bodies, parts of an unknown whole, or agents of change. – Eto OtitigbeMorton Fine Art is pleased to present Materiel Remains: Consider this a blueprint, a series of blueprints., a solo exhibition and a new series of works by the multidisciplinary artist Eto Otitigbe. A creator best known for his public art installations and site-specific interventions, Otitigbe’s work revolves around the recovery of lost or repressed historical narratives and their visual possibilities within the public eye. In his first solo exhibition with Morton Fine Art, Otitigbe reflects on the recent history of public art and its institutional deployment. Materiel Remains will be on view from May 28 – June 28, 2022 in MFA’s Washington, D.C. gallery.
In his work as a painter, sculptor, curator and fabricator, Otitigbe distorts the materialist distinction between blueprint and artifact, as well as the functional and contextual differences between monuments for posterity and temporary obstructions. Assuming a temporal framework that unravels intent and disaggregates historical coherence, the artist recognizes history as a grand artifice formed from the selective privileging of facts. In this conceptual vision, the role of the monument becomes a manifestation of historical record, visualizing and physically implementing preconceived narratives into present public space while making room for echoes of the past to take shape. Otitigbe’s thoughtful, tactile inversions take on the parlance and pose of public art while tacitly alienating in their collective messaging, creating specific objects that are both recognizable and not, and which play around themes of race, imperialism and historical teleology to excavate forgotten pasts and evoke new futures.
Group installation of new works from 2022, 20″x16″, valchromat & acrylic paint mounted on panel
Materiel (sometimes, matériel) refers to equipment, apparatuses, or supplies which are strategically deployed by an institution or group. Primarily a military term, the artist’s co-option of the word in reference to his own work draws attention to the tactility and provenance of his gallery works, as well as the specific geographies of the sites they refer to. Through the incision of engravature, and in traces of paint which stipple each work like a remnant, Otitigbe explores hidden sides of the same artifacts – rummaging through the residue of the large-scale public sculpture projects he’s made over the past four years to rememorialize them from ambiguous perspectives. His fusion of mixed media drawings, sculptural objects, and plate engravings create a new form in turn, somewhere between an object’s schematic conception and its material realization.
Dr. Nova (diptych), 2022, 60″x72″, aluminum and acrylic paint mounted on wood panel
By placing in dialogue the conceptual frameworks, design blueprints, specific histories and local landscapes which led to the realization of each work of public art as a discrete interactive form, Otitigbe unearths a profoundly materialist study of modern signifiers in public space. In his current public projects – including his work as a member of the Design Team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville – Otitigbe has been involved in what theorists of Afrofuturism might term “countermemory”: assemblages which contest the colonial archive to establish the historical character of Black culture. In this current exhibition, Otitigbe collects the remains of these projects for a study of the materiel in the imaginative inquest of a future archaeologist: attempting to both trace and fuse the phenomena of recent history into a blueprint for the previously unseen, as well as to posit new futurist perspectives from which to study and critique the recent past.
Eto Otitigbe is interested in recovering buried narratives and giving form to the unseen. He is a polymedia artist whose interdisciplinary practice includes sculpture, performance, installation, and public art. Otitigbe’s public works includes temporary installations in Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, NY) and Randall’s Island Park (New York, NY). His current public commissions include: Peaceful Journey (Mt. Vernon, NY, 2022); Cascode (Philadelphia, PA); Emanativ (Harlem, NY); Passing Point (Alexandria, VA). He was a member of the Design Team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at UVA (Charlottesville, VA) where he contributed to the creative expression on the memorial’s exterior surface.
Otitigbe’s work has been in solo and group exhibitions that include 2013 Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial, organized by the Bronx Museum and Wave Hill; Abandoned Orchestra, Sound Sculpture installation and performance with Zane Rodulfo, Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Golden Hour, Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta, GA, curated by Oshun D. Layne; and Bronx: Africa, Longwood Gallery, Bronx, NY, curated by Atim Oton and Leronn P. Brooks.
Otitigbe’s fellowships and awards include the CEC Artslink Project Award for travel and cultural projects in Egypt and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Museum of African Art where he explored the intersection of Urhobo language and historical objects.
His curatorial projects include directing the es ORO Gallery in Jersey City, NJ (2007-09) and co-curating, alongside Amanda Kerdahi, the Topophilia Exhibition in Nees, Denmark (2017) as part of the ET4U Meetings Festival in Denmark.
He is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture in the Art Department at Brooklyn College. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, an M.S. in Product Design from Stanford University (M.S.) and an MFA in Creative Practice from the University of Plymouth.
He has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2022.
Eto Otitigbe is interested in recovering buried narratives and giving form to the unseen. He is a polymedia artist whose interdisciplinary practice includes sculpture, performance, installation, and public art. Otitigbe’s public works includes temporary installations in Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, NY) and Randall’s Island Park (New York, NY). His current public commissions include: Peaceful Journey (Mt. Vernon, NY, 2022); Cascode (Philadelphia, PA); Emanativ (Harlem, NY); Passing Point (Alexandria, VA). He was a member of the Design Team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at UVA (Charlottesville, VA) where he contributed to the creative expression on the memorial’s exterior surface.
Otitigbe’s work has been in solo and group exhibitions that include 2013 Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial, organized by the Bronx Museum and Wave Hill; Abandoned Orchestra, Sound Sculpture installation and performance with Zane Rodulfo, Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Golden Hour, Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta, GA, curated by Oshun D. Layne; and Bronx: Africa, Longwood Gallery, Bronx, NY, curated by Atim Oton and Leronn P. Brooks.
Otitigbe’s fellowships and awards include the CEC Artslink Project Award for travel and cultural projects in Egypt and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Museum of African Art where he explored the intersection of Urhobo language and historical objects.
His curatorial projects include directing the es ORO Gallery in Jersey City, NJ (2007-09) and co-curating, alongside Amanda Kerdahi, the Topophilia Exhibition in Nees, Denmark (2017) as part of the ET4U Meetings Festival in Denmark.
He is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture in the Art Department at Brooklyn College. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, an M.S. in Product Design from Stanford University (M.S.) and an MFA in Creative Practice from the University of Plymouth.
He has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2022.
About Morton Fine Art
Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora.
Morton Fine Art founded the trademark *a pop-up project in 2010. *a pop-up project is MFA’s mobile gallery component which hosts temporary curated exhibitions nationally.
Gallery hours: By appointment only. Mask still required.
Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 