Darrel Morris @ Second Street Gallery

My wife and I moved to Charlottesville Va almost two years ago and were surprised at all the art stuff here - a lot for a city this size. There's two art museums, several small commercial galleries, a city-run arts center with working artist's studios and various other little spaces to hang stuff up. It's a combination of a major university here, the general liberal attitudes of people, and, most importantly, money.

The best place to see great stuff here is Second Street Gallery, located downtown, just off the pedestrian mall. A non-profit alternative space, they show artists from all over the country in group and solo exhibitions. I didn't expect to find a place like this in C'ville - it's as good as the great alt spaces in big cities like New York.

Up for a couple more weeks there is work by the Chicago artist Darrel Morris. From the press release:

For decades Morris has made his career by expanding the scope of contemporary fiber art, delving into psychological content taken directly from his own experience growing up in Kentucky on the western fringes of the Appalachian Mountains. Influenced early on by his grandmother, who taught him to sew, Morris learned to draw with the needle, utilizing a "physical line that is under tension." The emotional content of these pieces reinforces the tension of the embroidered line, giving the feeling that the whole world would unravel if one thread were cut.

This new group of works addresses broad social issues, directly implicating the viewer in symbolic narratives that touch on human insecurities, politics, and shared emotional states. The preparatory collages reveal his working process, where figures from the morning paper are transformed into cartoon outlines of profound visual impact. Morris's stitched drawings are created from his collages through an intricate process of collecting images from the newspaper, collaging them together, and then carefully "whiting out" all but the contour lines of the figures. This painted collage is then traced to create a ghost-image which is stitched onto the canvas as the paper is torn away.

These works are big and amazing. They're like cartoons in thread, and the surface of the fabric is better than most paintings. What I really enjoyed seeing in this show was his working drawings. He told me he goes through the newspaper every morning and clips pictures, and has done this for 20 years. Here's a detail example:




and then a detail of the final stitched piece:



He also has some other pieces - man made of sagging fabric:





One last thing - Morris was telling me how he had a grant to make these and had others helping with the actual stitching. Some students from the Art Institute where he teaches were also helping, and told him, "We have to leave the studio to go to a party." His reply - "Leave the studio? This IS the party."