With Pools—Cocowalk [Miami], Sarah Morris acknowledges the swimming pool as the ultimate emblem of Miami's particular lifestyle and ideology. In the series of paintings from which this work hails, Morris fragments the grid as a compositional structure in order to create concave structures reminiscent of the refraction of light through prismatic lenses or water. The paintings hover between representation and abstraction; architectural qualities are de-emphasized and distilled into large, glossy, color-saturated paintings containing references to the urban environment and spectacle. The related film Miami follows the city’s drift from luxurious living to a somewhat dead-end vision of “the good life.” Within the film, Morris focuses on the architecture, people, and industries that define the city. Pools—Cocowalk [Miami] continues Morris’s systematic study of artifice, surface, and the covert.

Object label from Extreme Abstraction, July 15–October 2, 2005