LOCKY MORRIS | BLOCK BASICS
One day artist Locky Morris stepped up on a rickety stepladder with a camera and took individual portraits of 10 lightbulbs hanging from exposed block-wiring and plasterwork in his studio. It would be the only work that he would make in that studio. He focused his camera on the “comically” different wiring. The artist’s lightbulb moment came after watching a YouTube clip on “Block Basics”. Here the lightbulbs are presented for the first time as a sliding puzzle of 8 light bulbs (with the 1st through 9th lightbulb presented on the facing page in isolation, and the 10th featured on the cover). The bulbs rotate sequentially and clockwise, one bulb at a time. Looking at these out-of-focus light bulbs with in-focus wiring the line of sight becomes cockeyed, the brain charged synaptically in the absence but possibility of light within and upon the work of making art in the studio. Sometimes we need to become cockeyed in order to see. Locky Morris’ visual playfulness is great and good: great in the sense of its elevation and illumination of sight from the blindness of the familiar; and good in its positivity, agility and the light it brings to bear on the world and its phenomena. It figures that the suggestion of light in a series of 10 lightbulbs would attract the artist’s eye minus the fated doom of the moth.