Artist Entry: Abelardo Morell

In my last meeting Jeff introduced me to artist Abelardo Morell. A working Cuban artist and teacher he focuses on both nature, surrealistic situations and sculptural elements that act as the art. He has many different pieces that all say different things therefore I will only focus on two pieces: Childhood and Camera Obscura.

Children live in a world where everything is pretend. They can entertain themselves for ours playing a game with someone who is not present. As adults, we do not have that ability. We can try to get to it but its difficult because reality always has a way of creeping back in. In this series, he is showing pieces of childhood but one piece in particular stands out to me. In my house, there is a time of day where a strip of light shines on my wall, through the curtains and through the leaves outside creating this beautiful organic pattern with a lace-type texture, which has made me start paying more attention to shadows (Morell also has a piece dealing with shadows). Anyway, I liked his idea of creating these worlds within the shadows. These children created an imaginary home where they would play house, using nature to create it.

(I played around with this idea of shadows this weekend and didn't like my results. It felt like I was digressing in my photography rather than progressing.)

In his work, Camera Obscura, well...he uses a hand built camera obscura. I was so excited! I have been wanting to build one since I found out what it was but wasn't sure how to use it since I was able to create "projections" inside the camera with long exposures. Anyway, Morell uses the camera obscura to merge exterior and interior spaces (sound familiar!?). He essentially creates sculptural spaces using every object as a part of the sculpture. He creates these images not in the camera and not on the computer but in life, which is what Jeff gave me as homework. Perhaps I should take this as a sign and finally build one?