Julia Morison
Myriorama

Two Rooms is pleased to present a version exclusive to Auckland of Julia Morison’s continually changing exhibition Myriorama. This will be the second permutation of this work. The first was presented in Christchurch at 64zero3 in April.

A ‘myriorama’ is a Victorian parlour card game of specially printed small landscapes that can be horizontally repositioned to create imaginary panoramic vistas. Morison has seen connections between it and some of her past projects, and so devised her own version, inventing a restricted vocabulary of shapes which can be repeated and hung in different combinations.

Morison’s Myriorama has various modules that can be joined together. The various forms consist of flat semi-circles, quadrants, curved trapeziums, bullet noses, u-shapes and more. Each of these shapes has at least one straight edge that can be butted against any straight edge of another so that the internal parallel lines link up. When two or more (sometimes a lot more) forms are combined they acquire unexpected spatial depth. Planes start to bend into the wall or curve out; shapes tucked into corners take on strange ballooning properties; right-angled intersections flatten out and vice versa.

Most of the shapes have been layered with pale grey gesso onto which black parallel lines have been placed, mimicking the contours. The stripes are a development from Gargantua’s Petticoat, last year’s Two Rooms Morison show, where they were positioned directly on the walls to link up the modular configurations. During her Two Rooms residency she got the idea of placing them inside the painted units.

Over these striped surfaces Morison has put thin washes of ink. Their hue subtly varies, sometimes appearing as violet, other times grey or green. Within the pinstripes are tiny microcosmic worlds, minute land, cloud and seascapes that you have to peer between the lines to see. Delicate, miniature, panoramic Myrioramas hiding inside the larger abstractions, waiting for the viewer to discover