Alice Morey at MEWO Kunsthalle
Delicate yellow spores floating like lily pads in a lagoon of yogurt; curdled dairy separated into strata of brilliant turquoise blue; creamy rose rivulets coagulating on the edges of glass vessels, giving rise to condensation that collects above. Typically we’re interested in the repellent. Such is the case with Alice Morey’s first institutional exhibition, “Conditioning Calls for,” by which the artist mixes pigments with probiotic micro organism to foster the expansion of mould, proposing decay as a proxy for transformation.
The present’s eponymous set up contains six hand-blown glass receptacles hanging from chains, framed by two painted silk curtains that billow in response to your physique as you cross by. Inside every bulbous vase is a canvas immersed in yogurt and powders of lapis lazuli, pink ochre, and malachite, amongst different minerals. A delicate scent of fermentation fills the air—colourful cultures breeding amid the metabolic motion of enzymes. The close by portray Take a look at One (Malachite) (all works 2022), reveals the outcomes of such experiments, its cavernulous inexperienced and chocolate floor a wealthy abstraction that evokes mottled earth.
Different work like A Map of Tenderness, 2022—an summary with a white horizon line dividing registers of washy brown and brilliant orange, with smatterings of blue and inexperienced—additionally conjure landscapes, whereas winking on the meditative introspection of Mark Rothko’s colour fields. Morey, nonetheless, decenters the human, permitting closed ecosystems and their biochemical reactions to create their very own universe of microorganisms, coaxed into form by her hand. Such an intentional lack of overt authorial management subverts the timeworn trope of the male genius to focus our consideration not solely on nonhuman varieties, however on different potentialities for cultivating subjecthood. Morey thus conceives a portrait of the Brownian movement that underpins the wrestle for earthly existence, all of the whereas renouncing the human conceitedness that set the Anthropocene in movement.
— Louisa Elderton
