May 17 – June 22, 2025
For two decades, Zea Morvitz has been drawing in small notebooks, (seen in this exhibit) often beginning with images unearthed from memory. Not interested in precise rendering, she collaborates with the form to create unique abstract images, following her curiosity and imagination. After filling dozens of notebooks with hundreds of forms, Morvitz excavated some drawings as digital images and arranged them in grids. She saw how they could be read—in a mysterious wordless way—like hieroglyphs or runes.
Thinking of them as pictograms, she created a second series of collages (both series are in the show) rearranging images, looking at contexts, affinities, and narratives: two heads in conversation; a row of mountains as the days of a journey; thorns pointing to discomfort along the way.
In this exhibit Morvitz shares her fascination with ancient writing, and with how we read early alphabets as “undecipherable yet graphically interesting abbreviations”. And also her interest in archaeological methods: mining ancient sites for artifacts and placing them on tables to puzzle out the meaning.
