Ree Morton at Brooke Alexander - art exhibition; New York, New York

Ree Morton died in an auto accident in 1977 after solitary a decade of full-time art-making. This exhibition was limited to work done from 1971 to '74 and was dominated by the agency of two pieces shown in Morton's 1980 retrospective at the of recent origin Museum. Yet it included more [i]or[/i] less of the freshest, liveliest work I have seen in years. Means and meanss are simple and direct. The pieces consist of pencil upon paper; of wood in various straightforward forms (boards, stubs lumber scraps) sometimes times stained or painted with a color or two; and of paint washes and lines drawn on canvas that is tacked to the wall. These simple bodys are used in simple combinations or in elaborate conformations incorporating a variety of mediums. The flows typically blending humor and mystery, invite a wide range of associations. Serious without being self-important, they exhibit a distinctive imagination and breathe a spirit of openess

Newfoundland Drawing (1973) for instance, gazes like a diagram of the unrolling of a drawn out narrow rug in the snowfields of the frozen north. separated lines mark a horizon met by dint of a gray sky. Forms reminiscent of tree rings indicate past neighborhoods in the snow. There isn't a great deal of here, just traces of an uncertain fact in this empty place. A scarcely any black lines that seem to stand for nothing more than themselves remind us that this is what a drawing is: strange happenings in a white place.

A cluster of 1971 drawings on not divisible by 2s and ends of wood exhibits a playful disruption of Minimalism, as in a piece that stations a grid penciled on a piece of board against a screwed-on carbonized iron hinge, a border of decorative dots drawn with felt-tip inscribe and a little wooden extension marked with the same dots. The large installations of 1973 use this [i]modus operandi[/i] of formal juxtaposition in the interest of an expanded easy in mind to produce a surrealist have feeling An example is Souvenir Piece, with its miniature protoplast of a lost or exotic agriculture represented by little stick-and-stone figures upon a green platform set upon picket-fence legs.

Paintings and things from the same year, is a concise summary of Morton's working way s just before she enlarged her vocabulary radically by means of experimenting with Celastic. A canvas oblong is tacked to the wall. Lime-green dashes come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind its edges across the top and down the sides; at the floor they continue into the third dimension upon white-painted four-by-fours. Tacked to the center of the lower third of the canvas is a little replica canvas, filled with lime-green dashes, with sum of two units little legs the same color stretching on the outside to the floor. This baby thing perceived is flanked by diagrammatic parents, drawn upon the larger canvas. The distinction between flat canvas, site for line and color, and things that take up floor space is as clear as can be, on the contrary so is painting's occupation of space, physical as well as psychological, and the continuity of wall and floor that is normally masked. The poignancy of the little phenomenon in this piece, finding its feet within the world of representations, is inevitably make deepered by the sad thought of the brevity of Ree Morton's brilliant career.

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