Morgan O'Hara Friday Night

Morgan O'Hara Live Transmission : Friday Night Kitchen

“Friday Night Kitchen” indicates the four performance art that took place in the gallery. The white-cube space was replaced by a Taiwanese restaurant with the chef, the bartender, the staff, the gluttons, and the artist Morgan O’Hara. All of the participants became the performers of “Live Transmission- Friday Night Kitchen”.

It is O’Hara’s persistence toward lives’ movements that makes the quotidian a core concern of her works. Both individual actions and collective trajectories are regarded as shows that are happening just before her eyes. The works transform in two directions - compressing the time and the space onto the paper and unfolding the lines into a 4-dimension experience – with her graphite pencils in both hands.

“Friday Night Kitchen” originates from O’Hara’s experience in the summer of 1989 that influence her life. In that year, the Cattelani family (Italian collectors) invited her to visit Modena. The family hosted their friends every night with wonderful wine and food on its five-meter long table. However, O’Hara was unfamiliar with Italian that time (She spent 21 years in Italy afterward), then she began to observe the exaggerated intonation and gestures of people she met. After uncountable nights of feeling depressed due to language inconvenience, O’Hara decided to bring her pencils and paper to the dinner, trying to record all the movements happening in front of her. Some people started to feel uneasy and talk cautiously while the others stayed unaffected. All these subtle changes were highlighted in O'Hara's works, forming a behavioral performance program.

This is not just a matter of observation. All the people in this environment affect each other's actions immediately even the artist herself. “Friday Night Kitchen” is therefore the stage where daily performers launch their shows through the ways of representing the context, the actions, and reversing the function and the character of the space.