I recently visited The Naughton Gallery at Queen’s, where the exhibition ‘STOP LOOKIN’ AT PHOTOGRAPHS’ by Locky Morris was being held.
The exhibit
ion comprises a series of small scale assemblages from recent years by Derry-based artist Locky Morris. Featuring a range of new and unseen work, the exhibition focuses, in part, on an almost obsessive interplay of the photographic image within his practise.
Morris’ work often tends to reflect on the complexities and intricacies of his immediate terrain, touching on a broad range of subjects, from the highly personal and familial to the political. Renowned for his early work that explicitly death with the troubles in Northern Ireland, Morris has also received acclaim for his quietly powerful and intimate work, infused with a dark wit and often triggered by the detritus and abject in the everyday. Manipulating materials in surprising ways, he produces objects that at first may seem ordinary, but gain importance as layered narratives unfold to the viewer.
Strewn about the hallway is a trail of debris, lights, brooms, boxes, and other obstacles in a semi-organised sprawl. It’s like someone tried making a shop out of the bits in their attic, sifting through the junk, arranging it into small improvised displays. The skeleton of a mostly empty postcard stand is propped in one corner, while a clear container with the inevitable, unsolvable tangle of electric wires sits in another.
Propped up on one stand is a brown and grey photograph; what looks like a scuffed up, dirty floor, with a hand truck and some rubbish scattered around. A metal gripe runs across the image, with a thick, dull chocolate coloured sludge underneath it. Behind the propped up photo is an odd set up, with a work light dangling from a sideways soap dispenser- even more improbably, with a pair of sunglasses you can make out held inside. a text installed just beneath gives you a winding explanation;
Pulling back, the quarantined sunglasses might now make more sense, displayed in a sort of makeshift mini-version of the car workshop. But then by the photo itself you can’t help but look again to try and stare into the impenetrable depths of whatever forsaken globs of mani had gathered in that drain over the years.
Lucy Burns 