Exhibition of new works on paper by Jason Moran on view at Luhring Augustine
Jason Moran: The Sound Will Tell You, Luhring Augustine Tribeca, New York (January 16 February 27, 2021).
NEW YORK, NY
.-Luhring Augustine is presenting The Sound Will Tell You, a presentation of new works on paper by Jason Moran, which marks the gallerys second exhibition with the artist. Internationally renowned as a jazz pianist and composer, Morans interdisciplinary and often collaborative visual art practice mines the history of music, and its social, cultural, and political subtexts.
To create these vibrant and textured works, Moran places a sheet of Japanese Gampi paper on a piano and records his various attacks on the keys. The motion of his hands is tracked in layered lines of saturated pigment, and washes of color spill across the compositions, tracing the pull of gravity, or charting the creases and natural fibers of the paper. Recalling traditions of gestural abstraction and automatic drawing, these works are the material record of Morans private performances. Moody and abstract, they convey the physicality of a musical phrase, investigating a new vocabulary of representing acoustics in visual form. Recurring hues of blue run throughout the works: a metaphorical color with meanings and associations ranging from expressions of melancholy, references to musical blue notes and the Blues, a symbol of healing and harmony in North Africa, to Egyptian Blue, the first synthetic pigment in ancient times, whose formula was re-discovered by the prominent African American scientist George Washington Carver in the early twentieth century.