Art\u2019s all in the family for Dug and Dawn Haley Morton. Dug is a painter, Dawn a photographer, and their daughter Elizabeth, 9, is already emulating Mom and Dad by creating her own drawings and stories. The painter and the photographer, while working in different media, share a common sensibility in respect to subject matter. They like to depict ordinary moments of day-to-day life that are nevertheless odd, quirky, and occasionally a little frightening.<\/p>\n
Dug Morton\u2019s half of the exhibit will feature 19 new paintings. The artist grew up in Groton, Mass., and studied at the Boston Museum School. He has been showing his work in galleries all over New England for almost 30 years and has produced an astounding number of paintings\u2014well over a thousand.<\/p>\n
Dug is interested in those rare moments, but from a slightly different perspective. What Dawn might call \u201crarities,\u201d Dug calls \u201coddities.\u201d He likes to zero in on peculiar, even slightly unsettling sights, and then strips them down to their basics. The resulting impact, boiled down this way, is very powerful.<\/p>\n
A good example is Dug\u2019s painting of a young woman on a stretcher carried by four men. We have no idea what injury she has suffered, and in fact she does not seem to be injured so much as traumatized. She wears an unstained white dress. We don\u2019t see much of the men\u2019s faces. The superficially harmless nature of the men, and the apparent lack of serious danger to the young woman, somehow makes the image more menacing than comforting.<\/p>\n
In a similar vein, another picture presents us with a harmless map of the \u201clower 48,\u201d the continental United States minus Alaska. It looks like an educational game for small children, with the states in effect as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, each one probably made of wood and connected to a short peg for lifting the piece out of the larger puzzle. But above this we seeing a very dark cloud, and then realize there is a shadow the shape of the cloud covering the map, coast to coast, as it were. All sorts of associations come to mind\u2014foul weather perhaps precipitated by climate change, the future of our children laboring under a dark cloud of grim possibilities. What at first glimpse is a seemingly innocuous children\u2019s toy is, after a second and third look, anything but reassuring.<\/p>\n
Dawn Haley Morton began taking pictures in the seventh grade with an old 110 camera equipped with a \u201cflip-flash,\u201d graduating to a 35mm camera in the eleventh grade. She has been compulsively taking photos ever since.<\/p>\n
Dawn enjoys the excitement of capturing some special aspect of her surroundings, or what she calls \u201cfour-leaf clover\u201d moments. She recalls a friend who had a knack for finding four-leaf clovers and other rarities. Dawn delights in finding such curiosities all around her. She considers herself a documentary artist, although the images she captures are not the least bit humdrum. Quite the contrary\u2014these quirky, fleeting moments of discovery are light-hearted and fun but also a bit startling.<\/p>\n
One good example is a shot with just enough scary carnival light to pick up the nighttime subject\u2014an assortment of cute stuffed animals. We figure out that these cuddly cuties are prizes at a traveling fair when we take in the red neon sign in capital letters that reads \u201cGUN FUN.\u201d We don\u2019t see the pellet guns that customers might use to \u201cwin the little lady a prize,\u201d as the barker might call out. But we can\u2019t help seeing the guns in our imaginations when we get hit (visually) with that noisy sign.<\/p>\n
Even a little more horrifying, if in a humorous vein, is a hand-drawn sign presumably at a seaside tackle shop, that reads: \u201cunattended children will be sold as FISH BAIT\u201d. Dawn has several shots on this theme of lovely, soft-hearted scenes that at first conceal something surprising. A close-up of a campfire makes us practically feel the warmth of the red-hot logs and sigh in contentment\u2026until we notice what looks like a bunny on a stick. We can guess the object is candy, but since it\u2019s dark and effectively just a silhouette, we don\u2019t know if there\u2019s someone holding the other end of the stick to \u201ccook\u201d the candy over the fire or whether we\u2019re seeing the moment when the little creature is being consigned to the flames. Either way it strikes the viewer as funny, even if we feel a little ashamed of laughing at it.<\/p>\n
Dawn wants to present us with \u201csomething that I see that no one else sees.\u201d She refers to this method as a search for \u201cfunky\u201d images, \u201csomething a little weird\u201d that also makes her smile or laugh. These quirky moments might involve a woman running for a train, a vintage sign that awakens memories from many years ago, or any number of everyday images. \u201cMy thing is the emotions,\u201d Dawn says, relishing those moments of discovery that arouse strong feelings of all kinds. Her \u201cfocus on people\u201d comes through in both candid shots of the people around her as well as formal portraits.<\/p>\n
Dawn majored in Communications and graduated from both Endicott College and Fitchburg State College.\u00a0She has enjoyed a successful career in media in Boston, and currently works in\u00a0film and video production\u00a0at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. She recalls taking a class in video production when she was a senior in high school, getting her started on a career in the field.<\/p>\n
She doesn\u2019t miss old-style photography and doesn\u2019t use film anymore. \u201cI had some in the fridge for a long time,\u201d she recalls, but now she works strictly in digital. The current technology allows her to aim and shoot the second she sees a scene that she wants to capture.<\/p>\n