Aaron Morse at the Country Club:
Varying Perspectives
[Editor's note: We invited multiple writers to contribute their
observations about the current exhibition 'Kingdom of Nature' by Aaron Morse at the Country Club gallery. Karen Chambers and
A.C. Frabetti review Morse's work, while Jane Durrell discusses its relationship to the contemporaneous exhibition of Katie Parker's and Guy Michael Davis' 'License To Illuminate.' We also
provide a link to Matt Morris' review for CityBeat.]
As another example of a perspective, we invite you to read the press release by Country Club by clicking here.
A
full slideshow of the exhibition is at the same Country Club site. Though we have reproduced many images here, browse his whole exhibition by clicking here.
The kingdom of nature Aaron Morse shows us can barely be contained. His teeming, hustling subject matter is on the verge of escape, its life force is so strong. It's not much of a stretch to think some of it has escaped, into the next gallery, where 'License to Illuminate' takes over any flat surface and some vertical ones. The two shows, in vastly different mediums, share a witty sensibility and a perceptive outlook.
Morse takes on large subjects (Conquest of Mexico (2008), Deluge (2009), Christ Entering Coachella(2007)), sometimes playing fast and loose with actual facts but never with underlying meaning. His paintings and works on paper have a formal beauty that contrasts with possibly raffish, often disturbing subject matter. In Morse's 'Kingdom of Nature' people are a potent part of the mix.
Collaborators Katie Parker and Guy Michael Davis work in porcelain, a medium reduced in our time to china table ware but restored by them to genuine, questing art. Some is glazed, as we expect, and some pieces have a mat finish. Their recurrent subject matter is rats. These animals are full of vim, curiosity, and occasionally wear crowns. There is no reason they would not be at home in Morse's 'Kingdom of Nature'; they are very much at home in their own Country Club gallery.
Rats are not the only living things portrayed by Parker and Davis. A pair of porcelain snakes hangs high above three glazed and handsomely colored “Protobirds” and quite near them a rat wearing a small crown sits like a hat on the head of a belled pug dog. All this playful stuff is superbly executed and nudges the viewer toward thoughts not unlike those triggered by Morse's work. The word-play of the title, 'License to Illuminate', is further justified by a few actual lamps. They incorporate rats or, sometimes, the heads of wolves to hold the light bulbs.
Underlining connections between the two shows, the gallery has installed a few small works by Morse in the 'License to Illuminate' space. And - something easy to miss -in a niche in the wall above Morse's painting of Kingdom of Nature (2009) one of Parker and Davis's unglazed rats is quietly sitting, blending with its background, contemplating becoming part of the painting below. Or so I read it. There may be a less fanciful take, but that's mine.
Thinking about Aaron Morse's work, two antecedents come to mind: Edward Hicks and Hieronymus Bosch. There's an obvious reference to Hicks's Peaceable Kingdom (c. 1834) in the title of Morse's one-man exhibition at Country Club - 'Kingdom of Nature.' Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights(1504) similarly echoes the theme.
In his 61 variations of Peaceable Kingdom, Hicks laid out his vision of an ideal world in the clearest possible terms. An ox standing next to the king of beasts and a child petting a docile leopard are among other unlikely alliances in Hicks's universe.
In two of the earliest works in the Morse show — Palooka's Progress (2005), and Super Nova (SeaLife) (2003)— there's nothing equivocal about his perception of the natural world. In them he articulates his vision as bluntly as Hicks.
In Palooka's Progress, two fighters duke it out in a boxing ring, recalling George Bellows' 1924 Jack Dempsey and Firpo. In the Bellows' painting, the champ has knocked out the challenger who's falling over the ropes.
In Morse's painting, Palooka has just delivered the knockout punch. (The name Palooka refers to the comic-strip character Joe Palooka, which was drawn by Ham Fisher and debuted in 1930.) The 'progress' of the title is of evolution. To illustrate it, the artist starts with images of the 'big bang' and single-cell life in the lower right corner and traces the development of animals, culminating in the Homo sapiens boxer, backed up by an ape. Taking it on the chin, his opponent's head snaps back and his skull leads a line of skulls of increasingly primitive species, regression not progress.
The earlier Super Nova is simpler with sea creatures silhouetted against a sickly yellow background with faint brushstrokes making a wavelike pattern. The super nova streaks through the sky above the horizon line. Again, Morse alludes to evolution as a way of seeing the world with all its wonders.
These paintings are straightforward and didactic. It's all there with no subtlety. But in Morse's more recent collage works, he throws everything into the mix. He exults in obsessive layering of recognizable images scavenged from printed media, fragments of words, occasionally actual objects, and areas of pure painterly exuberance. It's visual overload, just like Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.
Compost (2009), like his other recent works, uses the overall compositional gambit of Pollock and vibrates with expressionist energy. It is a compost of everything natural with a few man-made elements slipped in — a Northwest Indian totem and an actual matchbook with no matches, for example. A faint green moon overlooks it all, offering some sense of space and turning the compost heap into a landscape.
The studies for Morse's larger works are amazing. Elements that are drawn freehand and colored in with watercolor stand in for the printed images he collages in his finished work. Conversely printed images in a study may end up being drawn in the completed work, as in Palooka's Progress.
While it would seem impossible for small-scale studies to map out his larger works, given their mélange of found imagery and painting, the 9¾in x 36in Study for Timeline Mural is remarkably like the final printed wall mural that papered the entry of the Hammer Museum of Art in 2008.
Looking at Morse's recent mixed-medium works is a little like reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, as some of my grade-school classmates did. (Yes, Virginia, there really were reference books pre-Wikipedia.) All the data is there in Morse's artwork and viewers can 'browse' at their leisure.
In Living World (2009) the canvas depicts an amalgam of assorted creatures that may populate a nature television series: a lion, alligator, bear, whale, assorted birds and more. Also present are human forms: a large female figure dominates the right side of the canvas, ghost-like in its rendition and gesturing upward. A caveman figure, much smaller, lurches to her left. The image is not just of the forest with its requisite Sun(s) and Moon, but also has watery depths on the left side. The animals appear to be ordered by their chronological life: there are dinosaurs on the lower strata with the contemporary beings on the top. The whole is united by a swath of red. In case the viewer doesn't get it, one may discern the barely visible words 'A Living World' written in the paint (the letters are so integrated into the composition that they can be easily overlooked).
The various images seem like stock imagery of the different animals, or simple graphic representations. The poses and gestures seem familiar. In fact Morse often works with collage in his compositions, and this piece indicates it: even the hand-painted figures seem duplicated from some previous representation in media.
This is an experience of nature that is thoroughly contemporary. Morse is not a Barye carefully studying the anatomy of animals in order to capture their power and grace, or a plein air painter striving to capture the beauty of an unspoiled oceanside (or using such for sublime references). He is a contempory, experiencing nature through the lens of the representational bombardment reproduced through the machine. If we had to ask ourselves how some youth (in perhaps big North American cities) experiences the natural world, it would be in the form of its reproductions. Images from advertising, National Geographic, internet web sites and more would populate the consciousness of nature of such individuals. One may argue that our experience of nature through the internet & television programs increases our knowledge of it, but our felt intuition —another kind of knowing— is certainly not cultivated.
Secondly, today the boundaries between us and the natural world have become blurred. It has long been part of culture to be aware of the animal aspects of the artificial world, but more recently the artificial has penetrated into the natural. There are few domains remaining in which the hand of humanity has not had some effect, damaging or otherwise (global warming, if one accepts the arguments of climatologists, geologists etc. over ideological skepticism, is heavily influenced by humanity; a changed ozone affects all life). There are also the arguments that humanity's technological achievements are an extension of nature, a part of her natural evolution. We question our relationship to the natural world, and we question what constitutes a natural world: the differentiation between natural and artificial harkens back to (outdated?) pastoral separations. And note also that anything we question —such as here our relationship to nature— already implies a loss.
Throughout his compositions Morse offers this inflowing of animal, human and machine. His work is a questioning of what constitutes human and natural, for the various canvases offer different possible viewpoints without settling on a clear distinction. We can see in Landfill (2009) a clear statement of human pollution, while in the The Kingdom of Nature (2009) and the aforementioend A Living World (2009) we witness more traditional renderings of nature. The latter two are also beautiful: the color is clear and balanced, the weaving of the various images draws one into a state if calm contemplation - like a walk in the woods?
Matt Morris already contributed 'The Hunted and the Hunters,' a review of the exhibition, for CityBeat. Click here to read
his full review of the exhibition. Here is an excerpt:
Many of these works are veritable orgies of Darwinian evolutionary models, music-concert enthusiasts, jungle creatures and warriors from all parts of history and culture —Mayan, medieval or fully suited army men that recall Desert Storm or its sci-fi doppelganger, the G.I. Joes of the movies.
While these dense collages possess a beauty not unlike intricate tapestries, Morse's delicacy and deft control of materials are shown better in a number of the more distilled works that focus on one scene at a time. (CityBeat, Nov. 18, 2009)
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