Implicit in these pieces is the conflict between limitations and desires, between thinking, imagining and doing. Moran concentrates on their physical embodiment, but her work extends the metaphor, especially in the sculptures, to touch on the limitations imposed by society on individuals, especially through constructions of femininity and womanhood. An even larger philosophical question is implied: when to struggle against limitations and when to accept and work within them. This question has been asked and answered in different ways at different times in history. Moran poses it again now in a personal, original form, but imposes no answer.

In Moran's photographs, she extends her interest in the effects of changes of scale. She makes a big blowup of a very small sculpture and so creates another ambiguity. Are we seeing something small from close up or something large from faraway? We have no reference points. She also experiments with effects of blurring--she moves the objects as she photographs them--such that viewers cannot be sure of what they're seeing. "I think it's important if the viewer can't place what they're looking at," says Moran, "when they don't know what it is, what the context is, how it fits in. I like those uncomfortable feelings. It makes me happy when I'm not in control."

The human face is the most recognizable of sights, so even when her photo portraits are blurred, as if vibrating with interior energy, we guess they are faces. (Untitled, 1995, silver prints; two large portraits of dolls, each 45"x30",1995) These mysterious apparitions, slightly sinister, slightly vulnerable slide away from certain identification. Photography is of interest to Moran because it has more "reality issues" than painting which is assumed to be an illusion. Photographs have the potential to create conflict or ambivalence between the real and illusory. She uses black and white to add a psychological distance.

Moran's work in all mediums needs the contexts of both surrealism and conceptualism, and like other contemporary women artists, she has often used the body as her ground of metaphor. She also exhibits an attentiveness to materials and craft. "I love craft. Every little detail I pay attention to gives the piece a feeling of preciousness."

The title of the exhibition is tactus, a word Moran discovered was used in a 1490 treatise on music. It describes the practice of silent hand movements to guide the rhythm of a chorus--the antecedent of the motions made by a conductor leading an orchestra. Such motions measure the passage of time, an invisible phenomenon experienced privately, and make it visible to a public. Moran likes to read the Oxford English Dictionary and enjoys etymology. Her choice of this word, tactus, strange because it's Latin but yet somehow familiar with its etymological links to "tactile" and "touch," is consistent with her broader aims and interests. She delights in finding words to use as titles that will not preset the mind in a definite direction, but open up a broad field of potential connections in which every viewer will find a place.

--Paula Harper
Miami, August, 2000

All quotations by Kate Moran are from conversations with the author in July and August, 2000.

Paula Harper is an associate professor of art history at the University of Miami, Miami, FL, and writes frequently for Art in America.