Senior Portfolio: Jessica Kern: Artist Post 10- Abelardo Morell

Abelardo Morell

Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948. Morell and his family moved to New York City in 1968. Morell studied at the Bowdoin College earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1977 and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University School of Art 1981. Morell has won numerous awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the New England Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, and the Alturas Foundation Grant. Morell is currently a professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art.

Morell is recognized for creating large room sized camera obscura images in various places and photographing them. Traveling the world and converting full-size rooms into large camera obscuras bring the outside into the rooms through a tiny pin-hole. Morell captures his photographs using an 8 x 10 view camera and makes them into mural size prints. Studying Morells delicate overlapping images is interesting the more you look at them because you find new details that you don’t notice at first. Morell originally worked mostly with black and white film but has recently begun working with color. Morell stated, “Black and white to me suggests a timelessness, a time forever, the color world feels like it’s that day it’s the temperature of that day, its very specific to a given time like impressionism or something.”

I am attracted to Morell’s work and how interesting the layers and the details of each image. The combination between two spaces indoors and outside fascinates me because of the blending of spaces I am working on with my current work.

Quotes

“I thought I’d teach my students so of the fundamentals of photography so I thought I’d make some pictures just showing them the mechanics of it. I made a photograph of a light bulb inside a box just to again show the simplicity of the history of the medium. I loved it so much I thought maybe I can actually make art pictures about the mechanics of this medium. “---Abelardo Morell

“Black and white to me suggests a timelessness, a time forever, the color world feels like it’s that day it’s the temperature of that day, its very specific to a given time like impressionism or something.” --- Abelardo Morell

Interview: http://www.lensculture.com/morell.html

Website: http://www.abelardomorell.net/

Gallery: Mannerism and Modernism: The Kasper Collection of Drawings and Photographs Group Exhibition, The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY January 21-May 1, 2011