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Artist's work a look into the soul of book, himself
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Published: October 25, 2009
When Leo Morrissey delves into a book, he does it literally. Using a razor-edged blade, he cuts into it layer by layer. When he is finished, the book looks as if it has been excavated in tiers, like a miniature open-pit mine.
Morrissey is an associate professor of art at Winston-Salem State University, and his creatively altered books make up one of his many conceptual art projects. Twenty-three of his painstakingly transformed books and one of his paintings are on view through October in a solo show titled "Bookworks" at Apercu Gallery in downtown Winston-Salem. The gallery is hardly more than a windowless office cubicle, but it comfortably holds these intimately-scaled works.
The holes Morrissey cuts into specially selected, secondhand books are shaped like his own clean-shaven head in profile, an image he employs as an icon of his personal identity. In effect, these works are self-portraits that playfully reference his cerebral inclinations and intellectual curiosity. He cuts each book's pages so that the silhouettes remain consistently concentric, decreasing in size from the front cover toward the center and back pages, as if the image is receding into the distance.
In a written statement about his work, he characterizes these cuttings as "a window into the book."
In addition to highlighting a book's three-dimensionality, Morrissey's precise incisions also expose carefully selected fragments of the books' text and/or imagery, including numerous charts and graphs. After he finishes cutting the pages, he seals the book with an adhesive so that it remains permanently closed and its pages are inseparable.
Most of the books are textbooks, technical manuals or reference books, covering subjects that include geography, natural science, air pollution, missiology and trigonometric theory. The silhouettes he cut into a human-physiology textbook -- whose cover is imprinted with a microscopic photo of cellular tissue -- extend to the depth of a page containing an illustration of a rain barrel with a spigot mounted on the bottom. In this context, the image serves as a metaphor for the human body. His title for the piece is stimulus, a word that appears on one of its exposed page fragments.
It's impossible to discern the title or subject of the slender, brown clothbound book that Morrissey has transformed into his piece titled plot. He has cut his signature concentric silhouettes into the book just deeply enough to reveal part of a page containing a geometric diagram reminiscent of a spider web and captioned "THE VISUAL FIELD." This piece clearly alludes to Morrissey' identity as a visual artist.
More gleefully playful than Morrissey's excavated books are the works in a group showing a few blocks away at another of downtown's smaller galleries -- the Electric Moustache. It carries the catch-all title "Farewell Season of the Sun, Welcome in the Season of Darkness."
The highlights are four drawings by Ricky Needham, all featuring the naked or scantily clad, long-limbed figures that this local, self-taught artist favors, along with assorted aircraft, turreted castles, amusement-park rides, and the occasional smiling bird or winged insect. My favorite is the one hilariously titled Satan in Mom's Bedroom Because I Have Been Bad. Less claustrophobic than Needham's other works, this domestic interior scene features two figures -- a lean, happy looking Satan with a pair of horns emerging from his head, and a lanky woman with a Mohawk haircut, apparently representing "Mom," as she preens before a mirror. Both figures wear tight, leg-baring body suits emblazoned with decorative images and cheerful texts such as "Smile We Friends and Keep It Cool I Love You."
Among other striking or otherwise distinctive works in the show is Laura Lashley's untitled, mandalalike painting of bright orange flower petals arranged in concentric rings on a black background, like a stylized rendition of fireworks exploding in the night sky.
The show also includes Shayna Parker's paintings of decorated human skulls -- clearly inspired by Mexican Day of the Dead imagery; Gaby Cardall's small canvases embroidered with more human-skull images; two small, cartoon-style drawings by Cassie Wood; Haydee Thompson's luridly colored, grimacing self-portrait photos; and lots of sewn fabric pieces that suggest sock monkeys crossed with voodoo dolls, all featuring scraggly Spanish-moss hair. The latter works are attributed to an artist identified simply as "The Wizard."
Leo Morrissey's "Bookworks" is on view through Saturday at Apercu Gallery in the Artists on Liberty building, No. 108, 521 N. Liberty St. The gallery is open by appointment. For more information, call 503-888-5930.
"Farewell Season of the Sun, Welcome in the Season of Darkness" is on view through Saturday at the Electric Moustache Gallery, adjacent to Krankie's Coffee Bar in the Werehouse, 211 E. Third St. For more information, call 413-3690.
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