electronic cello

source: bombsite

As fortunes usually unfold, Morgan O’Hara’s path took a new course in a Chinese restaurant in the early ’80s. At Brandy Ho’s Hunan Restaurant, cooking was a martial art. Watching the chefs from across the counter, O’Hara became transfixed by the speed and precision of their execution. She had been studying movement in terms of carefully considered mapping for some time, but this scene threw her in the moment, and she soon began her first two-handed drawings…what were to become her LIVE TRANSMISSION drawings. Part performance art, these works involve her assuming the movement of a subject with a number of pencils in both hands thus recording another’s movement on paper. In effect, she has developed a practice where life drawing becomes live drawing.

…So it was only natural that she undergo her latest performative drawings at The LAB gallery on the northeast corner of 47th and Lexington Avenue. The gallery, a repurposed storefront, becomes a center for public art and truly opens by displaying art in full view of the traffic and many a passer-by. Morgan O’Hara used the storefront as a stage, with a black-and-white backdrop of a blown-up 2001 drawing, collaborating with six musicians over a week’s time.

Peter Gregson was her first scheduled collaborator. He is a musician who works with the electric cello and at the forefront of what he has termed alt_classical music. His latest album, Terminal, was commissioned by Bowers & Wilkins and Peter Gabriel for their Society of Sound Label.