Malcolm Campbell Moran

This body of work is about time and people and their brief intersection ... the slow steady passage of time, the impermanence of the physical world within this passage of time, and the trace of stories exposed by decay. These collages are inspired by my observation of the urban walls of Italy, walls whose images date from the Renaissance to the day before yesterday . I photographed and sketched walls used by people to display posters, and flyers, graffiti, and liturgical art. It seems that the Italians have been scribbling, painting, and posting things on their walls since the days of the fresco artists. Embedded in the layers of marks and decayed pictures are stories and visual puzzles, conversations between one citizen and another (or one generation and another). My expression of these stories is for the most part abstract, with modern shapes transposed on backgrounds worn by time and circumstance.

The imagery of simple geometric shapes is reminiscent of conversations that I had with my father when I was a boy. His passion for physics and science and the physical world were deeply imbedded in my memory. Like the walls of Italy, filled with scribbles of one person speaking to another, these images are my conversation with these memories and my father.

Malcolm Moran's recent work from his Birds I Have Noticed series are inspired by the John J Audubon’s The Birds of America, a folio of engraved plates produced between 1827-1838 from watercolors created from observation along the Eastern United States.

The bulk of these drawings were made during his sojourn in the Louisiana delta region (Malcolm’s bithplace and spiritual font). Where Audubon focused his attention on the onthological and formal artistic observation of birds, Malcolm’s interests lie in the curious behavior of different bird species and the similar and perhaps related behavior of humans.