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 through January 6, 2023 at Homme DC’s Washington, D.C. space (2000 L ST NW).
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.
Heirloom, 2022 (Work in progress image) – Mixed media fiber collage installation, 198 x 53 in.Mirror 32, 2021 – 24 x 18 in. Mixed media on panel
CURATORIAL STATEMENT – by Amy Morton
Exuberant and cerebral, Liz Tran is nationally recognized and well-known in her home city of Seattle, Washington. Conjuring a world of vibrant, technicolor visions, she explores the nature of viewer subjectivity. A generous and open artist, her current solo exhibition, Matriarchs and Daughters Dream Oceans of Braille, feels like a gift of connection — almost a theme, this sort of connection continues the spirit of my gallery’s collaboration with Homme DC (in the exhibit’s presentation). This collaboration goes a step further in the form of Liz Tran’s spectacular installation piece Heirloom, which she lovingly completed with her mother.
17-feet long, Heirloom is composed of fabric drawn from her travels, memories and installations from around the world, including the curtains of a circus tent, an oversized fiber womb encased in a vintage trailer and a space suit onesie. The piece was sewn by her quilt-making mother, with whom Tran often collaborates. Tran’s work often places the self at the center, valuing self-knowledge and self-care. With Heirloom, Tran honors her mother and all the generations of women who came before her. Love and devotion seem to be at the center of Heirloom.
Cosmic Circle 1, 2020 – 24 x 24 in. Mixed media on panelBaby Father, 2019 – 24 x 24 in. Mixed media on panel
ARTIST STATEMENT – by Liz Tran
My maternal grandmother Joyce would be thrilled by the knowledge that my mother and I: dissected her pristine white tablecloth, stained it with turmeric and affixed it to my current installation, Heirloom. Like many grandmothers, Joyce was a little different. Meant for a lively life in the city, she managed to play the role of a farmer’s wife somewhat convincingly, but I often wonder what her story would have been like if she had been born into my generation. Her spirit’s foundational support of my beautifully unconventional life is forever present. I aim to make her proud, in my art and my life.
Mirror 5, 2020 – 27 x 54 in. Mixed media on panelMirror 8, 2020 – 54 x 27 in. Mixed media on panelCosmic Circle 3, 2020 – 24 x 24 in. Mixed media on panel
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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LISA MYERS BULMASH, Not Geo : Woman, 2022, 12″x9″, ink, hand-marbled and rice paper collage on watercolor paper
Seattle-based artist LISA MYERS BULMASH writes on her new series “Not Geo”:
Sifting through vintage images of Black people can be hazardous to your mental health – if you’re not prepared for what you might see. Even well-executed illustrations carry racist baggage. The cover story, if you will, was that scientists were studying anthropological “types” in the same way Charles Darwin might have drawn animal fossils. This kind of reasoning continued well into the 20 th century. That’s how National Geographic magazine justified publishing nude photos of people of color, for more than 100 years.
LISA MYERS BULMASH, Not Geo : Braiding, 12″x9″, ink, hand-marbled and rice paper collage on watercolor paperLISA MYERS BULMASH, Not Geo : Sitting Man, 2022, 12″x9″, ink, hand-marbled and rice paper collage on watercolor paper
The “Not Geo” series of collages is a play on National Geographic’s nickname, Nat Geo. Rather than perpetuating stereotypes, however, I’ve decided to rehab them with contemporary collage elements. Each person’s image is highlighted with marbled paper, elevating their presence much like actual marble does for classical sculpture. Delicate rice paper fragments and watercolors add a contrasting softness. My hope is that a touch of irony and humor will help restore some dignity to people once reduced to specimens. – LISA MYERS BULMASH
LISA MYERS BULMASH, Not Geo : Girl, 2022, 12″x9″, ink, hand-marbled and rice paper collage on watercolor paperLISA MYERS BULMASH, Not Geo : Crossed Arms, 2022, 12″x9″, ink, hand-marbled and rice paper collage on watercolor paper
“Mirror Three” by Liz Tran combines drips, spatters and ink on wooden panels with equal measures of abandon and precision. (Morton Fine Art)
Liz Tran
by Mark Jenkins,
May 21, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
Seattle artist Liz Tran drips and spatters candy-colored paint and ink on wooden panels with equal measures of abandon and precision. The abstract pictures in her Morton Fine Art show, “The Webs Installed by Our Dreams,” offer vigorous spontaneity and robust compositions, the latter often inspired by Rorschach test inkblots administered to her when she was a child. Yet minor tweaks to Tran’s formula yield very different effects.
Most of the paintings are rectangular and rendered on white backdrops. Even the loosest of them seem focused on a middle point, but that centeredness is accentuated in the two pictures on circular panels. Adding a colored background, especially the black of “Ornament 7,” also makes Tran’s free gestures more cohesive. So does moving the pictorial activity to the top of the frame in “Bluescape.”
One other painting offers a fruitful variation. “Big Bang 3” is hardly out of place in this selection, but its oscillating, concentric forms suggest something quite different from a Rorschach test inkblot: a Hindu or Buddhist mandala. Rather than one person’s untidy reveries, the picture evokes an orderly cosmos.
Liz Tran: The Webs Installed by Our Dreams Through May 27 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302. Open by appointment.
Visual artist Lisa Myers Bulmash joins Q13 News This Morning to discuss her appearance in a docuseries highlighting artists and museums from all over the country.
After a monthlong social media contest run by the Northwest African American Museum to select a local Black artist to represent Seattle in a docuseries, the museum announced the winner Monday: Seattle-based visual artist Lisa Myers Bulmash.
Seattle community members nominated over 40 local Black artists to participate in the contest and voted for their favorites on social media.
For the series, titled “The Story of Art in America,” Pierre Gervois, show creator and CEO and executive producer of Legit Productions, will visit 10 different U.S. cities with his team, highlighting artists and museums in each locale. Each episode features one city. The series currently has a release date of late 2021 or early 2022, on networks to be announced.
“I’m pretty floored honestly,” said Myers Bulmash, still giddy a few hours after hearing that she won.
A collage and assemblage artist, Myers Bulmash has lived in Seattle for 23 years and says her work is about making sure the stories and experiences of Black people are seen and heard, and showing the many connections between our past and present.
We caught up with Myers Bulmash to learn more about the artist, how she feels about representing Seattle, and her own “story of art.”
Detail view of “2,100 Miles Away” niche: The niche layers an image of a Victorian-era home beneath a transparency of a child… (Bellevue Fine Art Reproduction)
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you come to be doing the kind of work you’re doing?
I really started taking my work seriously sometime after Trayvon Martin was killed and then again after Tamir Rice was killed, because they were both very young. It’s hard to say which one hurt me more. The reason why was because I really started connecting these things to my own life. I have two sons — one just turned 16 and one is 12, which was the age that Tamir Rice was when he was shot. My husband and I used to joke that people who might hate us would have multiple reasons to hate our kids, because my husband is Jewish and I’m Black. Around 2012 and 2014, when Tamir was killed, was when it really settled into the pit of my stomach that my children were at risk just by being who they were. That got me thinking more seriously about the vulnerability of Black bodies. It got me thinking more seriously about my family history and genealogy and the stories that I’ve learned from that.
What is the purpose of art right now, when people are experiencing loss and trauma?
My reasons for making art especially in this time are primarily two things. One, to let people who look like me, people who have a history like me, people who are marginalized, know that they’re not alone, because for the last four years, it’s felt like that was about all we could do is say, “I’m still here. Are you still here? Yes, I’m still here.”
The other reason is partly representation. I don’t really think of me making work as part of a grand crusade to right the wrongs and uplift the downtrodden, but it’s important for people to be seen, to feel seen, to be heard, and a lot of the things I’m interested in showing in my work have to do with that. I also just want to throw a little of the unusual or magical into somebody’s life. The last four years, a lot of us have just been putting one foot in front of the other. As a kid, I was always really big on the idea of there being magic just around the corner.
How did little Lisa first get into art? What were the magical moments that made you believe that “magic was just around the corner”?
I remember asking for an oil painting kit for my birthday when I was a kid, maybe 12 years old. It was after I had gone through the encyclopedia — you know, those things we had before the internet — and just being wowed by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and so many others. I said, “Oh, I want to learn how to paint with oil paints!” My folks got me that for my birthday and I was really excited. I didn’t know a thing about it, so, of course, everything came out brownish gray. [Laughs.] So that was a big disappointment. But one of the things I love about collage is that even if I can’t draw like da Vinci, I can borrow his art to create something. I think I’m most excited when somebody connects with a piece of my work and wants to dig around and find more, wants to talk to me about some of the inspirations behind it or the processes I used. But mostly asking more about the images and why I use them.
How are you drawing those communication lines between past and present?
I pack a lot into my pieces. I have a friend who said this in the kindest way possible. She said, “Your work is sometimes too content-rich for the average bear.” That may be why most of my work is relatively intimately scaled as opposed to the big wall-sized paintings that you might see in a Mickalene Thomas painting. I think in most of my work I have a limited amount of time to reach the person who’s interested in it, and I’m probably talking about something they don’t really want to think about. So I need to get their attention, I need to hold it, and I need to sort of cut them off from everything else that might distract them in order to tell the story.
That’s a lot of pressure. [Laughs.]
Try being Black someday. [Laughs.] Look at the [artwork] “Bought and Paid For” — books that are mounted on antique washboards. With this triptych in particular I was thinking about a quote that’s been attributed to James Baldwin and Maya Angelou: “Your crown has been bought and paid for. Put it on and wear it.” When I was thinking about that quote, I was thinking about all the sacrifices and the difficult choices and the walking a tightrope that my parents and everybody before them have had to walk in order to get me where I am. [In the “Bought and Paid For” triptych], all of the altered books have a transparency image from my family archive of my brother running into the house we grew up in. I laid that image over various images of houses or things that aren’t anything like houses. The one on the far left is laid over a slave auction house, which obviously is not really a house. The center one is an altered version of the house my mother grew up in. The third one is the house that I started my family in.
This contest was pitched as: You will be representing “the soul and DNA of Black art in Seattle.” What does that mean to you? How do you feel about that?
When I saw that I was like, “Oh my god, you’ve got to be kidding me.” I’m not representing every last person, I’m not representing every last Black person, I’m not representing every last Black female artist. I’m not representing every last Black woman. It’s a lot to pack into one statement. So at first I was a little wary. Black people are not a monolith. I have to think about the DNA and soul of my Black art in Seattle.
And what is that?
One is, “Hey. Hey! HEY! We’re here! And we didn’t get here five minutes ago.” Partially representation. Partially trying to pull back and see how so many things that seem completely disconnected are actually connected either through history or art or perception. I actually had somebody say to me not too long ago that they liked my work but they didn’t understand why I was using old images to talk about contemporary issues. My response was, more or less, “Well, because all of those things are still happening, for one thing.”
What should people know about you and your work?
Some of the things I talk about are kind of hard to face, but I try to make work that allows people to face those things, yet still be able to live with my work. I guess my work is, um, living-room-friendly? [Laughs.] As for me, I’m just out here doing my thing and hoping I can convince some people to help me continue doing my thing.
Correction: This story has been updated. Due to incorrect information received by The Seattle Times, a previous version of this story contained erroneous information about the release date and network of the show.
Congratulations to LISA MYERS BULMASH for the rich review of her solo exhibition “The Home Inside My Head” in today’s print edition of The Washington Post by Mark Jenkins. (Arts & Style Section 12/27/20)
Lisa Myers Bulmash
Also spurred by pandemic-era exile from everyday life, Lisa Myers Bulmash conceived a Morton Fine Art show “The Home Inside My Head”. The Seattle artist combines found and personal objects into 3-D collages that conjure both African American history and her family’s own story. The pieces juggle the antiquarian and the immediate to express what Bulmash’s statement calls “a Black and female viewpoint”.
One series, “Rare & Exquisite,” places oversize models of endangered butterflies atop maps of regions of the United States collaged from Colonial-era (and thus not entirely reliable) charts. The effect is to correlate the threatened species — affixed with heavy railroad spikes that evoke hard labor –with Black people whose place in this country has always been at risk.
Examples of another antique tool, the wooden washboard, serve as frames in the “Bought and Paid For” series. The washboards hold books and ovals made of twine, which enclose overlapping transparencies of family photos. The pictures depict various old structures, including houses, and children at play. Again, Bulmash contrasts rough materials with fragile beings.
It seems apt that another piece is based on a torn piece of old sheet music repaired by kintsugi, the Japanese technique of using gold to both accentuate and exalt the cracks in a broken vessel. Bulmash’s assemblages can be seen as a bid to mend history.
Virtual tour and artist narration of LISA MYERS BULMASH’s first east coast solo exhibition, “The Home Inside My Head” at Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC.
“For most of this year, we’ve had to make a home inside our heads — because a virus was blocking the way out to “normal” life. That was fine by me at first: home is my castle and retreat. But there’s no vacation from yourself, or the deepest fears for your children’s future. Even a rich interior life becomes over-stuffed with emotions, memories and uncomfortable truths. The works in “The Home Inside My Head” reflect this ambivalence. The “Bought and Paid For” series was born from the love and deep gratitude for my ancestors’ struggles to give me greater opportunities. But even during my sheltered childhood, I recognized not every house feels like home as I experienced it. Not every parent prepares their child for ugly realities like institutional racism. As a 21st century Black woman, I need to make work that explores my disillusionments as well as my hopes for America. Collages like “One Nation, Under Reconstruction” are my attempts to name these experiences as truthfully as I can. I center a Black and female viewpoint in my work, as examples of a specific story illuminating the general human condition. But there’s something else. We can’t continue to tell each other the same stories featuring the same old heroes. Those icons accomplished amazing things everywhere but at home. We need to imagine our next home before we can live in it: this is the place where we build new narratives.” – LISA MYERS BULMASH, 2020
Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 