The phrase “War of Roses” refers to a series of fifteenth-century English civil wars for control of the throne of England, a 1989 Hollywood film, the title of a large-scale “Sound Graph” painting by Morris, and a phrase spoken by Kluge to Morris in explaining the contradictory nature of love itself.
This conversation, which was staged by Morris in Munich in the autumn of 2016 as part of her film “Finite and Infinite Games”. Kluge read a script written by Morris based on the James P. Carse’s cult book of the same name. Audio recordings of Kluge’s speech were subsequently used as the starting point for the compositions of Morris’s painting series “Sound Graphs” which highlight how language is a construct, particularly important in relation to art in our ‘post-truth’ age.
This artist book was conceived and created during the spring of the global pandemic. Morris created a leporello of the painting, her visualization of that conversation. She wrote a text to accompany the book, which catapults and contextualizes Morris in a narrative scenario where she receives a gift concealed in a cardboard tube, a Trojan Horse that begins the story.
Since the 1990s, Morris has produced a large body of work using paintings, films, site-specific wall paintings and sculptures which reflect her interest in networks, typologies, architecture and the city. Through her use both of reality and vivid, complex abstractions, Morris creates a new language of place and politics. She sees her paintings as self-generating, open to interpretation, motion and change, giving the viewer a heightened sense that they are part of a larger system. Creating a virtual architecture of forms, the work incorporates a wide array of subjects from multinational corporations, to transportation networks and maps, GPS technology and even lunar cycles. In her films, a parallel practice, Morris explores the psycho-geography and the dynamic nature of cities in flux through the multi-layered and fragmented narratives they contain. The situations the artist places herself and the viewers within reflect the hierarchies we inhabit. Uniquely playing with the contradiction of our complicity with structures both macro and micro, Morris is considered one of the most intriguing artists of her generation. She lives and works in New York.
