Art Review

06|09|2008: A Topographical (re)View

By Jason Landry, Art Institute of Boston MFA in Visual Arts candidate

BOSTON - Abelardo Morell has a compelling ability to reinvent himself through his work. His experiments usually lead to images like this one, North America: Cliché Verre With Ink Transferred to 8” x 10” Film, 2007.

This image is part of the exhibition Pictures in Pictures on display from May 14 through June 28, 2008 at the Bernard Toale Gallery in Boston.

Think along the lines of a photogram or a monoprint. A Cliché-Verre is defined as a glass print or picture that is coated, in this case with a black ink, on which a design is scratched into the plate and then left to dry causing cracking and tones of ink to mix and bleed. Etched on this ink-based emulsion Morell has chosen to show topographical views of various continents. His final designs are then transferred onto 8×10 film from which silver gelatin print enlargements are made.

This Topography, unlike his colleagues and peers who were included in the 1975 exhibition and catalogue The New Topographics produced by the George Eastman House, can be attributed to what the world is now seeing through our many visual channels: images taken from the Mars rover, satellite imagery from Google maps, or from other photographers such as Emmet Gowin whose aerial photographs of military test sites throughout the United States show the damage that our continental crust has endured.

Morell’s images have entered a new phase of an artist evolving far from the days of Alice in Wonderland and pictures taken from a child’s perspective toward a more humanistic and scientific view that edifies our society.