From Percolatormag.com - March 2007

Jeremy Mora: Sculptures
Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art
San Francisco, CA
1 February – 23 March 2007

Review by Tonya Warner

The miniature: Susan Stewart (who is often consulted on this topic) writes that minuteness reduces the object to its signifying properties, “incres[ing] the significance of the object within the system of signs.” This is because, she states, miniatures do not exist in nature; they are solely a cultural product, coming from the act of measuring the self against the physical world. Miniatures in this sense and in the work of Jeremy Mora, therefore, go beyond being merely an idealized environment – by creating scenes in a drastically reduced scale, these objects are removed from any real world context and therefore become little visual parables. Mora’s constructed scenes, made from materials such as concrete, lichen, graphite, and pourstone, have little grounding in reality and serve more as playful dystopian fables of man’s desire to control his surroundings. An overarching theme in Mora’s work seems to be the figure’s relationship to the built environment as well as the inherent divide between nature and culture – one which, the artist believes, can only be overcome through ruin. Rubble, therefore, is an essential element – partially insinuated through the construction materials he uses.

As the miniature is a cultural product, so is the landscape – marked as it is by the history of man – his actions and perceptions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a state of ruin – where culture has collapsed upon nature, creating an environment that is frightening for its human occupants. Such is found in “Anywhere But Here,” a barren scene composed of a cylinder whose center is hollowed out by a narrow jagged hole with a tiny ladder leading down. Starring into the vast expanse is a young girl, who acts as a surrogate for the viewer – neither of us know what is down there, but the mystery seems more threatening than appealing.

Each work on show embodies these broader themes, yet remains a self-contained microcosm with its own story. It is hard not to become absorbed in the details of these little worlds – details sometimes so fine they practically demand that the viewer get his/her nose to the art. The show at Mark Wolfe is scattered around the floor and attached like shelves on the wall (or even hung from the ceiling) – nothing appears at the customary eye level and with many the visitor has to crouch on the ground to see. Beyond a mere challenge to traditional methods of display, this serves to mark the body’s relationship to the miniature and the space all the more pointedly.

Which brings us back to the act of measuring the body against the physical world – in Mora’s sculptures, the scale always seems a bit off, wherein the human figures appear too small, almost insignificant except for their presence marked on the very landscape. For instance, in “Paint it Grey,” we find a Romantic landscape of craggy rocks and a gnarled tree with curling boughs. Look closer and you’ll see a tiny man dressed in white, straining with a long roller brush to paint the trunk grey. This seems rather futile as, due to the massive scale of the tree, he might never finish. This piece proves a perfect example of the theme of the misguided attempts by man to control nature.

Mora’s sculpture can therefore be read on two levels: firstly as examinations of space and scale, and secondly, as ruminations on relationships between culture and nature. This is not to say his work is deadly serious or overly theoretical; he maintains a level of humour and wit to the scenes that keep them from being too heavy handed or preachy. Mostly, they are a delight to examine – providing fresh details with every viewing – and serve as a springboard for the imagination.

see Susan Stewart. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1984. p.48.

http://icallitoranges.blogspot.com

October 23, 2006

The topics going on in Jeremy Mora’s work -- urbanism, the status of ancient objects, religion, museum displays, and the end of the world arrive in tiny packages, usually bound up with undercurrent of ecological awareness and deadpan humor. Most of his materials are found objects. Hollywood, 2006 offers discarded pourstone as metaphor for a pulverized L.A, its Hollywood sign in disrepair. Can You Hear Me Know, 2006 is found dried latex paint, pencil lead, and a contact lens constructed into a empty, unpopulated world where communication as failed. All together, the sculptures do not form a coherent narrative, but instead many events are suggested and then the outcome is left quiet.

The show is at its best when we as viewers are implicated in the space. Mora’s work is close to what Bonsai accomplishes. His sculptures are pruned and kept as tight as possible, not being small just to be small, but expand the real space of the gallery and more importantly the gallery’s narrative space. When you are in front of a Mora sculpture, your eyes focus and you become bound up in a constructed moment with generous rewards.

Like Bonsai, your orientation in the space is tricked and enriched. The perspective induced by Ladder in the Sky When You Die, 2006, forces your eye up a ladder into a small cave. Why we are climbing and the quasi-depressing place we are going are both bound up with portents both physical and metaphysical.

Passing, 2005 is the show’s prize. A little field of found concrete and a nudge of sheetrock create a landscape which can be viewed through a small found lens, which strangely resembles the torn window wreckage of a downed aircraft. Through the lens the scene is somewhere between an Antonioni film scape and Duchamp’s Etant Donnés. You view a nun who has died, and coming from the distance, over a hill rendered large by the sudden thrust of the lens in scale come a young boy and girl. We are looking through the lens, a cinematic moment, but like with Etant Donnés, we are implicated in that moment, we are sucked in and somehow made responsible for what we are viewing, only instead of viewing the Origin of the World, we view a departed nun, a world lost somehow.

Tourists, 2006, could be an updated Caspar David Friedrich. Like Friedrich’s Walk at Dusk, 1830, at the Getty, we find monks on a walk in the woods. They find an ancient ruin, seemingly set up on a hill like a zoo exhibit, protected by a fence. The imagination has a field day here. The little monks are interested and one could assume reverent in their pursuit, but they are seem thwarted. The ruin has entered the museum; it has been removed of its ritual, the aura is gone.

Mora graduated two years ago from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. This fact is significant for Chicago has many artists working in a similar vein as Mora, creating tiny worlds that change the landscape of the gallery by compressing architecture into little intense moments. I have written here about Mike Peter Smith and Duncan Anderson, who have found the narrative potential of such scale. Another Chicago native, Sumakshi Singh, unlike the other three, brings an organic focus to her work. These artists instantly recall the work of Charles Simonds, another artist working at a time of overblown installations and gaudy melodramatic canvases on the walls.

In Mora’s work, I was pleased to not be in another booming installation or standing before another Malibu beach house giant painting. It is refreshing to be able to treasure the small moments in world where attention spans continue to decrease and traffic and noise continues to overwhelm.