Otto Moran

My art is process-oriented. My aim is to communicate my creative process––and the ideas and emotions which inspire it––to the viewer. This matters because I believe the stories behind my pieces are as important as my pieces’ formal qualities. For the viewer to fully appreciate my work, they must have a sense of my journey towards the final product.

At the beginning of the course, my process was calculated. I selected media and techniques to communicate specific political messages, evidenced in my piece titled Limbaugh Speaks on Climate Change. As I shifted into printmaking, some of my work, such as Love, Ironman, remained political. Nonetheless, as my printmaking became less methodical, my message became less political and more concerned with emotional expression, as demonstrated by The Sister.

After becoming inspired by Surrealist automatism, I began automatic painting to see how this technique would change my work. I found the technique enabled me to probe my subconscious without worrying over the work’s ultimate message. While the method was liberating, I became frustrated that it forbade revision. I changed direction and began exploring open-ended themes with a more structured process. My collage, The Discovery, epitomizes this shift through its exploration of sex, violence, and maturation. Exploring conceptual themes enabled me to combine my premeditated and automatic techniques to produce profound and exciting work.

In addition to the Surrealists, I was inspired by Dadaists like Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp and his ilk rejected the notion that art had to have a particular angle, or message, an idea I espoused in my artistic process as the course progressed. The risks Duchamp took with humor, demonstrated in his parody of the Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q., gave me the confidence to be raunchy in my own artwork, exemplified in You’r First. I have also taken cues from Neo-Dadaists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, whose combined use of mediums in his “black paintings” inspired me to explore multi-media collage in pieces such as Good Morning.

I arranged the artwork in my exhibit to create balance amongst my pieces; grouping them according to medium or technique would have compartmentalized my work, limiting the interaction between pieces. I began on the right side of my allocated space, placing my boldest piece, The Discovery, on the center of the inner right-hand wall panel. I then placed both of my wood and nail pieces below the collage. I reversed my decision, however, and moved one of my pieces above the collage, which created an interesting conversation between the three pieces. On the rightmost panel, I assembled my Untitled Paintings in Acrylic series. I positioned it high on the wall since centering it would have put it in competition with the adjacent The Discovery, my exhibit’s focal point. Below my acrylic paintings, I placed my woodblock collages because, like the acrylics, these pieces exude an abstract physicality. Simultaneously, the figurative images in the collages complement the geometric shapes in the acrylic paintings, thus continuing the conversation amongst my pieces. .

As I began planning the left-side of my exhibit, I was initially unsure how to arrange my very abstract silkscreen prints beside my two textual works. I began by placing the textual pieces on the inner panel such that they were positioned between two of the silkscreen prints; placing them on the far-left would have alienated them from the rest of the show. Subsequently, I aligned Green-Blue, composed of two automatic gouache paintings, below One, Two, the print series on the leftmost wall. Thus, I balanced both pieces’ similarly uniform color palettes with their dissimilar mediums. I unified these leftmost pieces with the greater exhibit by placing One, Two far enough down the wall that its top aligned with that of Good Morning, a woodblock collage on the far right of the exhibit.

Viewed all together in the exhibit, I hope my artwork creates an intense experience for the viewer. My work is emotive and aims to inspire a visceral reaction. This emphasis on emotion over intellect renders my work universally accessible. Going forward, I will refine my process to facilitate deeper introspection in myself and the viewer. I will also continue to take risks with new mediums and techniques to achieve stronger forms of expression.

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