Portrait: David Kenneth Ireland, by Morgan O’Hara
Morgan O’Hara: Portraits for the Twenty-First Century
January 24 - July 25, 2004
Morgan O’Hara is a visual artist whose work has been exhibited internationally since the 1970s.For Mapping the Pacific Coast: Coronado to Lewis and Clark, the Sonoma County Museum commissioned O’Hara to create a gallery installation of her work Portraits for the Twenty-First Century. This body of work, begun in 1978 and executed primarily during the 1980s, is conceptually-based portraiture process based on the geographic displacement patterns of 154 individuals of many different professions.
Portraits for the Twenty-First Century begins with the notion that a depiction of a person’s life travels provides as accurate a picture of who that person is as a painting or photograph of their face. A pattern of movements can say as much as the cut of someone’s clothing, the lines on a face, or the landscape outside a window.
The portraiture process includes an interview of the subject and the simultaneous recording of the subject’s movements through life beginning with the birth place and fanning out from there. Lines of movement are traced on top of several layers of maps of the world, countries, cities, neighborhoods - to create a picture of a life over time. The shape of a person’s travels is the abstract landscape of their life.
In Mapping the Pacific Coast: Coronado to Lewis and Clark, visitors can map their own lives at a hands-on self-portraiture station in the gallery.
"General acts of mapping and activity-charting render the imperceptible perceptible, by establishing scaled coordinates. O’Hara takes the acts of mapping and time-charting several steps further. Into mapping she incorporates not only the coordinate measure of space, but the measure of space over time - the collapsing of the fourth dimension into the third, as rendered by the second." -- Peter Frank
"As a visual artist who exhibits internationally, I thought about modern life and how much people travel today. It occurred to me that a portrait in the twenty-first century should be something different than the lines and contours of a person’s face. The places a person visits in the process of creating and living his of her life seem primary to me. This was the origin of my thinking for this series." -- Morgan O'Hara
