Monika Morgenstern : I Dwell in Possibility
Murray Bridge Regional Gallery 2023
By Sasha Grbich
The darkened space is lit just well enough for me to navigate between gently glowing, portal-like artworks. I am first drawn through a long gallery toward a video projection. A constant low sound atmosphere accompanies abstract patterns moving like smoke particles on air. The pulsating looped video swirls and disappears. The use of primary green reminds me of algae, bringing the primordial world of microbes into unexpected relation with the monumentality of video projection. This is this domain of gods, weathers, and viruses, and Morgenstern makes good use of the more-than human overwhelm these forces evoke. The rising and falling patterns reveals text that also travels forward and recedes out of view as if offering fleeting transmissions from another realm.
The video starts by asserting ‘I am the wind’ and in so doing amplifies words that druid/bard Amergin Glúingel is believed to have spoken when, in an act of poetry and conquest, he recited his way off a boat onto the shores of Ireland.[i] The words mix seamlessly other mystical texts (including gleanings from Genesis) to create an amalgamated, all-knowing, otherworldly script. Morgenstern has undertaken a long-term project of collecting such threads of phrasing, acting as scribe for forces that seemingly speak from beyond human knowing. Existential uncertainty is answered by the calm voices of these seductive fragments, disquieting for the authority they assume.
Morgenstern works with fluidity and confidence across media, making it difficult (beyond the video) to locate the field of the artworks. They hover somewhere between the status of being paintings and sculptures with their layers of saturated pigments suspended on glass strata. Compositions are made up from panes, which are carefully held apart by custom built frames. Light becomes the primary medium, reflecting, highlighting, and illuminating pigments with its movements key to the material magic at play.
Perhaps the most mysterious and affecting work are those located on the longest wall of the gallery. Here hangs a run of square framed works each dominated by a shape at their centre, two with squares and five with circles. The sequences of images itself feels like a code to decipher. Each iteration varies the techniques used in the last. In one a circle is suspended behind opaque glass and emerges from yellow seepage, in another the circle is more distinct but obscured in part by purple and white spill. Glowing (thanks to careful spotlighting and their build-up of layers of glass and pigment) these works feel most loaded with possibility and yet are the closest to being indecipherable. They achieve the authority of being important messengers without the complication of words.
In the main spaces Murray Bridge Regional Gallery is hosting the touring iteration of FUMA’s Bee-stung lips: Barbara Hanrahan works on paper 1960-1991. The exhibition has been carefully installed to highlight the suite of Hanrahan’s works curated under ‘celestial bodies and the afterlife’ bringing parallel the concerns of these two strong female artists. Whilst Hanrahan’s expression of spirituality is woven into the dense universe she created, Morgenstern offers a more focused consideration of desire for mystical manifestations and the possibilities of human encounters with the numinous. The questions Morgenstern raises emerge through her use of sacred texts, making visible the mechanism of such utterances and examining the workings of religious aesthetics. There is rich visual pleasure in both artists’ works, with Morgenstern learning from churches of her birthplace Germany (their soaring hymns and coloured glass windows) while Hanrahan’s spirituality is a grittier celebration of the blooming world found in suburban Adelaide.
In this significant solo exhibition Morgenstern has created a universe replete with ectoplasm-like patterns, where disembodied voices talk back and greater meaning (always left undefined) is possible. Her exhibition title - I Dwell in Possibility - is the first line of a poem by Emily Dickenson (that great poet of life’s fragile edge) and provides an appropriate entry to an exhibition that invites its audiences into a glowing, liminal place of unknowing.
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –
Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise – [ii]
[i] Lady Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men, Part 1, book 3, The Landing, 1904 read 22 Feb 2023 http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/gafm/index.htm
[ii] Emily Dickinson, ‘I dwell in Possibility – (466)’ in The Poems of Emily Dickinson Edited by R. W. Franklin, Harvard University Press, 1999.