New Studio Blog!

Welcome to my new studio blog!

If you've visited this site in past months / years, you'll remember it as my portfolio blog. The portfolio work still exists in the links to the right, which are slowly being woven with posts from my previous studio blog, Fiber Art Studio. One reason for making the shift is that Fiber Art Studio was hijacked by bots who were difficult to shake. A year later the bot issue is resolved, but I've had time to reflect on the direction I want to take my studio blog.

I realized I wanted to have a blog that encompasses all I do as an artist rather than be limited to fiber art. Fiber art has always been just one tentacle of my practice -- a large one, but not the whole of what I do. Jana Morgan Studio should more appropriately represent the different media and directions my work is taking / has taken over the years.

Collective Memory Walk

Here are some people at the opening creating their own "Walk from Memory" to add to the collaborative piece, Collective Memory Walk.

The instructions I offered were: choose a ground and thread, retrace your most memorable walk in stitches.




opening photos taken by Reverend BLAMO

The idea behind the piece is to translate experience and thought into a tangible object / narrative. Through the mediation of the material, the stitched memories begin to look more like one another than the original territories or, specifically, the walk each person took through his/her territory.

As new visitors come to the show, the piece continues to grow. The overall effect looks a bit like Tibetan prayer flags.

Show Opening at Fitchburg State College's Hammond Gallery

September 15th was my show opening at FSC's Hammond Gallery. We had a turnout of 135 people, which was excellent. 110 people (thus far) have participated in the collaborative project where everyone stitches a memorable walk.

Over the next few days and weeks, I'll post pictures of the collaborative piece along with my other pieces including the Walking and Driving in Los Angeles: Retracing a decade in a month map being stitched as a performance over the course of the exhibit.

The show runs until October 20th.

I (with the help of two student curators) will be hanging the solo exhibit at Fitchburg State College's Hammond Gallery this weekend. Here's some info about the exhibit:
Fiber Art Kicks off CenterStage Season

The Final Nesting Place

Bird's Nest Dress, 2009
off-loom garment free-woven from shoe strings, fabric scraps, ribbon, wool yarn and felt

Building the Bird's Nest Dress, progress notes 3: What to wear in this particular naked city

I'm working on a solo exhibit for Fitchburg State College's Hammond Gallery (Massachusetts) in September called "What to wear in the Naked City." The show is a psychogeographic exploration that stitches together connections between the psyche and environments – both the body's immediate environment (clothing) and the larger environments of cities. I'm interested in how places imprint themselves on the mind and how this imprint affects (easy or encumbered) movement through those places.

Pieces for the show include clothing built of found objects from 3 places I've lived recently: Los Angeles, CA; Knoxville, TN and Fitchburg, MA.

The Bird's Nest Dress (below) is constructed from shoestrings and other scraps found in Knoxville, TN. Here's what I've built thus far:


For more about the Bird's Nest Dress, click on the label "Bird's Nest Dress" below.

Building the Bird's Nest Dress, progress notes 2: Do, undo, redo

Because the process of the Bird's Nest Dress is free-form, I've had to rework the structure of certain parts several times. Here are some pics of the uninterrupted progress:

Building the Bird’s Nest Dress, progress notes 1: We won’t play your distinctions between nature and culture

Barbara Kruger, We Won't Play Nature to Your Culture

I began the Bird's Nest Dress free-weaving project a few years ago in tandem with the Figleaf Loincloth under the intention of joining the two pieces together into one garment. The Bird's Nest Dress with Figleaf was to be one in an ongoing series called "Wardrobe for Paradise."

In the series, I was playing with nostalgia and the Edenic myth as it relates to the female body, to (what I consider) a misguided notion of "returning to nature," to modesty, suffering, clothing, hair and covering.

In the Bird's Nest and Figleaf pieces in particular, I wanted to make connections between two different processes of free-associative weaving and speak to how organized activities – whether they be the repeated motions of birds or humans – result in binding disparate elements together and in building protective coverings. I was thinking of the nest as a place to lay eggs (not to mention a derogatory term for female pubic hair) and of the fig leaf as this trope in Western painting used to cover female genitalia (and hair).

Though it's customary to associate weaving (or building in general) with the inception of human cultures, I'm interested in the similarities between human weaving and other animal weaving in much the same way I'm interested in similarities between dendritic forms of both trees and freeways. I don't see the two as distinct or oppositional, which I think ultimately unveils my progressive hopefulness in the ultimate outcome of human evolution.

Pictures from stage 1 of the Bird's Nest Dress:

The Psychogeography of Art School, Raphael’s Transfiguration, sequences, stills, what's above and what's below

Some weeks ago I gave an artist's talk. Coincidentally, the week I prepared my talk was the same week I taught Renaissance painting in the Art Appreciation course. As I traced the development of my ideas and looked at the work of Raphael (et al), I was reminded of the originary point of a longstanding conceptual / formal concern that began when I was still an undergrad student.

Undergrad studies in art school typically consist of ½ studio courses and ½ art history courses. So, as a young art student, I spent half my time working with materials and the other half writing / using language to talk about images and ideas. Through the labor itself, a dichotomous structure (shifting between sequential and holistic) was building in my mind that would make me susceptible to ideas and concerns I still pursue.

One of the art history courses I took in those early years was Italian Art. For this class, as with most art histories, we had to write a weekly one page response paper on a work of our choice. One particular week, I wrote about Raphael's Transfiguration because I found something conceptually / structurally compelling about the artist's representation of time in a 2-D medium, which is obviously not time-based.



The Transfiguration depicts a story told in the Christian Bible in which Jesus is transfigured on the mount while the disciples below attempt to heal (unsuccessfully) an epileptic boy. The painting represents what's in the text, but also represents what the text cannot – the simultaneity of two separate events.

In the gospel verses, the events appear one after the other. Through the basic limitations of language, we experience a lag as one short narrative follows the other. However, in the painting, the events appear together as they are in the real time of the story -- coexisting in a single moment. Though the eye still moves around the image creating something of a sequence, the overall impression is holistic and simultaneous. Even the separation of places (the above with Jesus and the below with the disciples) are collapsed into a single place within the space of the painting.

So with this painting and my short response paper to it, I began to wonder not only about the holistic visual representation of narrative sequences, but about turning still images (non time-based media) into sequences – turning Raphael's Transfiguration on its head, so to speak. I wondered: what if the given were the image and not the text? What if the image gets translated into language? What if there were no translation but, instead, the syntax of a collection of isolated images?

Eventually, I began to pull stills from video and arrange them into other narratives. Like The Transfiguration, these "Horizon Line" pieces are about the sequence and the still and about what's above and what's below.

Blog as archive

From this point back on the blog, the older posts act as a portfolio / archive. These posts document selected pieces that best represent the progression of my ideas and art practice.

Some work needs to be rephotographed and other pieces need to be added, but the basic structure remains: each entry is dated December 31st of the year the work was produced and/or exhibited and I update or edit as often as I'm able.

You can find older progress posts at Fiber Art Studio, my previous studio blog site.

Instance of Resistance

Instance of Resistance #10: Feral greenery in the underground city
digital photos on fabric over-stitched onto canvas
2008
3' x 4'

detail below:


When I lived in Knoxville, TN, I took these photos in the underground city outside my studio on Gay Street. Here is an article by Jack Neely explaining a bit of the history of the city below the city

This work is part of a series I call Instances of Resistance where I search out and photograph feral plant life growing among human construction / ruins.

Instances of Resistance

Instance graffiti #4: 11 feral plants, 8 twigs and 1 cross-beam in brick ruin
digital print and pencil
2008
8" x 10"

Instance graffiti #1: 12 feral plants among others in brick ruin
digital print and pencil
2008
8" x 10"

These are from a series of the digital photos of feral plant life that I printed onto Bristol Board then drew over with a soft-lead pencil.

I chose drawing as the medium because I wanted to put my own hand into the photos and make a connection between the role of subjectivity in my art practice and the un-tameable, rogue plant-life. I also thought that drawing would be the best way to animate the plants with playful and caricature-like personas.

I enjoy how these pieces invoke nostalgia (a theme in my work) with their simultaneously shadowy presence and candy-like preciousness.

Fig Leaf Loincloth

Fig Leaf Loincloth
off-loom tapestry free-woven in cotton and hemp
2008
14" x 8"

This playful little piece is part of a series I call Wardrobe for Paradise.

Psychogeography of the crazy quilt

Los Angeles Aerial #3: Psychogeography of the crazy quilt (in the fashion of Jackson Pollock)
men's neckties, hand-dyed fabrics, thread and yarn on canvas
2007
3'x 4'

This piece is made up mostly of men's neckties that I wove into a thick fabric, hand-stitched together with other hand-dyed fabrics, cut into squares, reconstructed into a grid, stitched to canvas and drew over with machine stitching. I invested months of meandering, free-associative stitching into this painting / crazy quilt. Both the long process and the final form reflect my personal response to / map of the flows and restrictions of everyday life (daily driving) in Los Angeles.

Random Pastoral Aerials

Random Pastoral Aerial #3: Flows and fissures
oil and mixed-media on panel
2007
3' x 2'

Random Pastoral Aerial #4: Pools and micro-climates
oil and mixed-media on panel
2007
3' x 2'

These aerial paintings explore my relationship to sites of city and country and to a "naturalized" view of the human imprint (in this case, agricultural) on the landscape. Like most of my work, these pieces play with ways of knowing a landscape: either through a sequenced / time-based relationship (as in walking, one foot / image in front of the other) or a spatial, holistic and mapped view. The aerials would be the mapped view. The ideas were nuanced by personal experiences (moving back to Appalachia from Los Angeles) and the loss of my imagined relationship to "the country" from afar.

These aren't paintings in the usual sense as I used processes more akin to fiber dyeing than to mark-making or brush-work. First, I allowed the paint to move about on the panel in response to my controlled motions (similar to what I'd discovered earlier with dyeing and staining raw canvases). With this process, images emerge that are simultaneously random and patterned as with other dendritic forms. Upon seeing such forms emerge, the process made it easy for me to imagine I was as much a force of nature governed by physical parameters as a collection of trees, a leaf or a city like Los Angeles. My movements and thoughts constructed the same forms as a branching tree, a forking river, a vine of ivy, a clump of blood vessels, an interstate freeway system or a cancer.

Second in the process, I deliberately filled-in the spaces created between the randomness. This way of working was very deliberate and opened the pieces up to choice, patterns and a different form of repetition.

I found the relationship between the precision and the fluidity to be meaningful during that time of transition. In fact, I find this work to be very personal as it reveals my thought processes and struggles at a time when I was trying to re-situate myself in a location that (in nostalgic recollection) I had believed to be familiar and, yet, was so utterly different than the city which I'd become accustomed and whose streets and freeways I knew so intimately.

Decay Under a Bright Blue Sky / Homage to Fall

Decay under a bright blue sky / Homage to Fall
mixed-media on panel
2006
17" x 35"

This humble and poetic little piece is one of my favorite landscapes. It's part of a series I call The Perfect Fall.

I used a process similar to some of the dimensional aerial paintings where I draped panels with wood and paper. Here I draped vellum over wood panel and used pencil to make rubbings over the textured surface, which gave birth to the tree-like forms. Then I painted the sky with cerulean blue acrylic paint. The flatness of the blue paint offers a watery, sinking and sliding contrast to the spiked and desiccated wood forms below.

Landscape Action #3: The Perfect Fall

The Perfect Fall: After peak and on to loss

I photographed this Landscape Action in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee when I was living in that region. It is part of two other overlapping series: The Perfect Fall and Tourism and Tragedy

Leaf Angels in the Manner of Ana Mendieta: Ground

Leaf Angels in the Manner of Ana Mendieta: Ground
canvas, dye, fabric paint, wax, chalk
2006
3' x 4'

I dyed a mottled ground on raw canvas, then applied a beeswax resist by rubbing pebbled pavement and painting with a brush. I redyed it several times, removed the wax and brought out more definition with fabric paints. I chose fabric paints so the canvas would remain soft and pliable. I wanted the paint to meld with the fibers (as in dyeing processes) rather than just sit on top of them like a traditional painting.

Finally, I drew a chalk outline where the shadow of a figure is suggested and photographed it outside on the ground. Something intrigues me about returning art to a site of inspiration like this and then (re)photographing.

I use the word 'rephotographing' because this piece was inspired by photographs I took in the Smoky Mountains for the "Landscape Action," The Perfect Fall: After peak and on to loss. The Perfect Fall series overlaps with another series I call Tourism and Tragedy. The Ana Mendieta piece is a part of both series.

Hairshirt / Wandering in the Desert

Hairshirt / Wandering in the desert
artist's hair, wig hair, tulle and thread
2006
2' x 2'

The back of the shirt is part drawing and part painting. I've swirled locks of my own hair between 2 layers of tulle and hand-stitched them together with meandering lines. I was thinking intuitively of aerials, maps and wandering, but also of suffering, femininity, notions of beauty and living in the desert.

9 Walks from Memory

Memory Walks
hand-dyed cotton yarn on raw canvas
2004
10" x 12"

Each of these small canvases are a stitched memory of different walks on the same route. The walks were a part of my and Frank's (my marriage partner's) nightly routine when we would stroll the same familiar route through the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. Xs mark the beginning and ending points of each stroll, which physically began and ended at the same point but, in memory, never quite match up as they are re-walked / re-membered through stitches. Each memory is different in emphasis... what with how, in recollection, I might linger on some stretches of road a bit longer or shorter amount of time or accentuate the twists and turns of the streets at slightly different angles.

Sometimes the actual walks included an extra loop around a connecting street (depending on the evening and my and Franks's energy level or interest). This accounts for some of the stitched memories including an extra little loop in the stitching while others do not.

In doing this mapping project, I was drawing a connection between sequential, time-based activities (walking, stitching, remembering, narrating) and spatial, mapped imagery, which are usually static. I was also marking evidence of how repetition, reimagining or re-telling of a story, even in stitches, ingrains a pattern and molds the map (over time) into a more idealized (or nostalgic) form of the "original" territory while still allowing for idiosyncratic differences between each repetition.