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“Portraits for the Twenty – First Century” Morgan O’Hara Movement is the theme that permeates all of Morgan O'Hara's work and activities: whether as an artist, a teacher of creative psychology, or a multimedia performer. She became well known with her drawings "Life Transmissions" – protocols of the movements of everyday actions all the way to Buto dance performances. The "Portraits for the Twenty-First Century" are another form of these movement studies. With these O'Hara has been conducting a highly unconventional form of mapping since 1978. What is mapped are the paths that she herself or other people have traversed in the course of their lives so far; she lived for many years in Japan, for instance, before moving to Los Angeles and later to New York. To create these portraits, O'Hara lays the same piece of paper on maps of the world, countries and cities, one after another, and traces the respective route. The resultant interweaving lines create individual world maps, including their own borders. With this focus on a person's movement, O'Hara explicitly carries out a reformulation of the art genre of the portrait. Name, profession, place and date of birth are noted in the title of the picture. Unlike the conventions of classical portrait painting, however, it makes no difference which status the person has or which class they belong to. All that is visible are the traces of movement and they are all equal – regardless of whether they involve a trip around the world, a change of residence, commuting, flight or emigration. What O'Hara takes into consideration and emphasizes with these portraits is that traveling marks biographies in the 20th and 21st centuries. At the same time, with these individual maps she provides counter-images to the dominant methods of visualizing mobility. Artist, born 1941, lives and works in USA, Italy, and Asia. |
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