An artist of many media, O’Hara makes visible the time, space and movement aspects of the experience of living.
In 1975, O’Hara began her Time Studies, a series of charts and diagrams that serves as a daily autobiographical record as well as a reflection on meaning. She began Portraits for the Twenty-First Century shortly thereafter, tracking the geographic displacement pattern of 155 individuals on the surface of the planet.
Participants of the 2014 vs. Interpretation festival will be familiar with O’Hara’s Live Transmission series, a time-based performance practice in which the artist, drawing with both hands, observes and tracks the movement of a living subject or subjects as graphite line drawings. Since 1989, O’Hara has created some 4,000 Live Transmissions, a number of which appear in the Agosto Foundation’s first publication, vs. Interpretation: An Anthology on Improvisation.
Cultural theorist Paul Virilio wrote in 1997, “Adept at ballistics (the science of projectiles), Morgan O’Hara is an antenna, a department of registrations which detects and follows inexhaustibly the range of our limbs. As the aneroid barometer registers the high and low pressures of the atmosphere of a region, Morgan O’Hara inscribes on her pages nothing but the deep barometric depressions or the quick storms of our comportment.”
Concurrent with her residency at the Agosto Foundation, O’Hara is also creating and performing work at the Rŭcni papírna Velké Losiny, a 419-year-old Czech handmade paper mill. Her residency will culminate in an installation at Školská 28 Gallery, opening on 3 September. Further details about the opening event will be made available here on the Agosto Foundation website.
O’Hara is currently seeking individuals of all ages—artists and non-artists alike—to participate in the process of creating new drawings at Školská Gallery. Participants should be able to commit two hours on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays in the upcoming two weeks. If you are interested in participating, contact the artist at morgan@morganohara.com or curator Daniel Vlček at daniel.vlcek@seznam.cz.
Bio
O'Hara met John Cage as a twenty year old art student in Los Angeles and his thinking, writings and music have had significant influence on her practice. Her drawings are performed in international performance art festivals; commissioned as site-specific wall drawings; and are in the permanent collections of museums and art institutions in Europe, Asia and the US.
Important residencies include MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Macau Museum of Art, China; Djerassi Foundation, Woodside, California; Nha San Studio Hanoi; New Space Arts Foundation Hue; Zero Space Saigon,Vietnam; Aomori Contemporary Art Center, Japan; Guapamacataro, Michoacan, Mexico; Operation Table, Japan.
Recipient of fellowships from Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Gottleib Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others. Her work is represented in public collections (selected): National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Cranbrook Art Museum, Detroit, Michigan; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Arkansas; Weatherspoon Gallery, Greensboro, North Carolina; Hood Museum of Art, New Hampshire; Czech National Gallery, Prague; Moravska Galerie, Brno, Czech Republic; Macau Art Museum, Macau, China. Her permanent site specific wall drawings can be found in Macau, China (2); Kobe, Japan (9), and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Publications include five volumes of LIVE TRANSMISSION drawings.
