THESIS
1975, Art and Architecture Gallery, Yale University, New Haven CT.
Michael Morrill’s MFA Thesis Exhibition was presented at Yale University in 1975 in the Art and Architecture Building* Gallery. Designed by Paul Rudolph and completed in 1963, the A & A Building stands imposingly across York street from the Yale Art Gallery. The Art Gallery, designed by Louis Kahn, was completed a decade earlier in 1953. The exhibition was comprised of two works; a sculpture in the round titled Rift, and a wall construction titled Shelf. The sculpture and wall construction aimed to mediate the stark monumentality of the soaring multi-stepped A & A gallery, and bridge the gulf between the two masterwork buildings.
Rift, composed of assorted geometric components of varied form and dimension, quotes and condenses the strict orthogonal ordering of the A & A Building, while its curved planes and edges covertly echo the majestic, cylindrical main stairwell of the modernist University Art Gallery. (The Art Gallery can be seen hazily across York street through the windows of the A & A gallery in the photograph of Rift to the far right in the bottom row.) Bisected by a narrow space formed by two opposing and parallel surfaces, Rift alludes to the aesthetic rivalry and physical separation between the two buildings. The dual sections of the sculpture seem to attract and repel. The built forms in unfinished plywood introduce warm color and surface variation to the uncompromising gallery space, and nod to béton brut building techniques.
Shelf abstractly translates and mirrors the tiered interior of the building. An isolated plane projecting from the right side section of the two-part piece hovers over the sunken pit below the exhibition wall, referencing the 37 different levels of balconies and walkways that network throughout the interior of the A & A Building. Horizontal and vertical rectangles of layered, warm color compositionally span and connect the space between the two components of the work, presaging an unexpected turn to panel painting by the artist a decade later.
* The Art and Architecture Building was renamed Paul Rudolph Hall in 2008 after an extensive renovation and restoration, and the addition of the Jeffrey Loria Center for the History of Art and the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library.
