Pol Morton / Sara Murphy

Opening reception: Thursday July 13, 6-8pm

White Columns is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of works by Pol Morton and Sara Murphy. The exhibition comprises a group of paintings, drawings and sculptures in which the body, exaggerated or shrunk, mapped onto canvas, wood, or cut into mirror, encounters itself as both subject and object.

Pol Morton’s paintings reconstruct the experience of living in an unreliable, chronically ill body and the body’s understanding of its ongoing recovery. The diaristic mode is enacted in content and in medium specificity: images drawn from the artist’s memory are as essential materials as the real cat hair forming the ears that rest atop Memorial for Babe.  The mirrored surface of the work fragments the viewer, a fragmentation echoed throughout Morton’s work, in which the body is rarely recreated in whole but rather experienced as a collection of discrete though interconnected parts. Recurring motifs enshrine the repetition of the homebound body: in Vertigo, hypnotic spirals hover above two cat heads, and the artist’s face finds itself reflected; the spirals reappear as eyeballs.  Painted only in navy, the piece’s restrained palette has the counterintuitive effect of appearing like a hallucinatory fever dream. This dreamlike state reoccurs in Pillow Wounds, wherein a found pillowcase cover just stretches to cover the painted edge of another bike wheel: the memory is glimpsed, but ultimately obscured.

Across painting, sculpture and drawing, Sara Murphy examines the body’s attempts to orient itself in space. The sculptural work Closed, Closed, Closed, Closed 2 presents the form of a chair refashioned so that it cannot fulfill its use; rather, the object navel-gazes at its own squared reflection, both a semiotic in-joke and a rejection of functionality. In Nusuth, the form of an upper arm is mirrored over the middle of two shaped panels, which slope gently, like the centerfold of a book. The work’s title comes from Ursula K. Le Guin’s sci-fi classic The Left Hand of Darkness, which takes place on an alien planet populated by androgynous beings. In the fictional religious language of the novel, the word translates to “no matter,” i.e., never mind, don’t worry about it: it is a statement of inaction, and the bodies in Murphy’s paintings appear similarly suspended in states of flux. Like Morton’s work, they are not in repose, exactly, but rather responding to the condition of being observed, what Murphy describes as “two parallel registers of experience: sensing the body as an object, and presenting a body in social space.” The tension between the exactitude of the poses enacted and the vagueness of the forms depicted creates a space for what the artist terms “authentic perceptual attention.” Murphy’s works are distinctively haptic, and are, in fact, produced via a form of contact, as the artist’s process involves Murphy tracing her body directly onto the surface of a piece. She describes this as “a way of drawing from observation — one where the operative sense is that of touch rather than vision. Rather than translating what I see into an illusion on a flat plane, I’m creating a direct trace of my body’s experience of space.”

Pol Morton is a chronically ill non-binary artist making assemblage paintings about queerness, transness, and disability. Born in Palo Alto, California, they received their BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (2009) and lived and exhibited in Beijing, China for four years. Morton received their MFA at Hunter College in New York City (2022). Their work has been exhibited in NYC at Klaus von Nichtssagend, Storage Gallery, Trestle Gallery, Field Projects, and Shin Haus; in San Francisco at Bass and Reiner; in China at The Beijing American Center, and the Luxun Academy of Fine Art; and online at White Columns and Young Space; among others.

Sara Murphy received a BFA from Memphis College of Art, and MFA from Hunter College. She also holds a Certificate in Art Conservation from Studio Art Centers International, Florence.  She was a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist’s Grant in 2016, and a 2017 resident at Shandaken: Storm King. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Essex Flowers Gallery and Cleopatra’s Gallery, and in group shows at Rachel Uffner Gallery, The Journal Gallery, and Halsey McKay Gallery, among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Morton and Murphy’s exhibition is a part of White Columns 2023 summer programs that focus on the work of artists who are currently represented in White Columns’ Curated Artists Registry. Founded in the early 1980s the Registry provides a platform for artists – of all kinds – currently without gallery representation in New York. The Registry currently includes the work of more than 500 individual artists. To learn more about the Registry and how to submit your work for consideration, please visit: registry.whitecolumns.org

For further information about this exhibition contact: violet@whitecolumns.org

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am to 6pm.