Morgan O’Hara: Live Transmissions
Overview
Featured at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the spring of 2008, this solo exhibition presented a body of Live Transmission drawings created by artist Morgan O’Hara throughout the previous Next Wave Festival as well as other drawings created at BAM. Invited to attend live performances across BAM’s stages, O’Hara used her distinct performative drawing technique to track and record the physical gestures, choreography, and music of performing artists in real-time. The resulting graphite works condense fleeting, ephemeral stage movements into dense visual archives, bridging live performance with contemporary mark-making.
Project Context & Curatorial Role
As Curator, I commissioned O’Hara to document the 2007 Next Wave Festival season, establishing a creative feedback loop between BAM’s performing arts programming and visual arts exhibitions. O’Hara’s Modus Operandi requires intense observation and real-time execution, using both hands holding multiple razor-sharp graphite pencils simultaneously. Drawing with precision, she tracks the subtle and dynamic movements of performers live as they occur in space, capturing that which is normally fleeting and concretizing it on paper. Grounded in a time-honored tradition of life drawing, O’Hara’s practice bypasses rigid oppositions between figurative representation and pure gesture. Rather than illustrating a scene, the drawings act as a third actor or mediator in the theatrical experience, rendering the invisible kinetic energy of Next Wave performances permanently visible.
Role: Curator
Dates: April 8—May 18, 2008
Venue: Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Brooklyn, NY
Artist: Morgan O’Hara
