Aaron Morse’s exhibition Sea and Land at Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles illuminates braided and conflicting responses to climate catastrophe. The paintings speak to our moment of fear, denial and hopelessness in the face of ecological collapse. That would be one way of looking at the sixteen or so works. The most prescient approach might be to see love and entanglement, beauty, humor and grief all bound together.
Morse’s graphic approach mimics the flatness inherent in techniques such as screen printing and risograph. The tertiary palette describes periwinkle fish and faded rose sea foam. The teeming compositions are agog with all manner of species, geology, clouds and human activity. All pile onto the flattened picture plane vying for a starring role. The nod to a flat surface of competing color planes gives way to subtle shifts in chroma and shape that pulls the viewer into a bewildering and shifting depth. It is akin to being tossed about under the breakers. The energy comes from considered juxtaposition not overheated gesture.
A work such as Life of the Shore is a jumble of overlapping animal wills. Shorebirds, dogs, wolves and crustaceans occupy the foreground engaged in their own agendas. The phosphorescent green sea is a color that shifts from putrid to transcendent. A blue sun hangs in a forest green sky abraded to reveal a cadmium red underpainting. The feeding flock of shorebirds become calligraphic marks against the sea. It is easy to read many influences: Edvard Munch’s high charged luminous nordic landscapes and Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, but the vocabulary is all Morse’s.
The works in Sea and Land offer no salve, no cry of outrage, no call to Edenic return. They give the viewer who takes the time to look closely something more important. That is an unsettled ecology that is both in peril and blooming. No easy answer but a goad to approach the multitudinous Earth with complicated joy unbound to cheap hope.
Aaron Morse, Sea and Land
February 10-March 9, 2024
Philip Martin Gallery
3342 Verdugo Rd.
Los Angeles, CA
A REMINDER:
THE GROUND BENEATH US AT BUILDING FIVE
STORYTELLING AND DRAWING WORKSHOPS
COST :
$400 per workshop
$1000 for a bundle of any three workshops
$1600 for all five payable by April 1, 2024
Register at www.buildingfive.org
Five immersive, intensive weekend workshops.
Old stories come from specific places, from lands with distinct voices. Stories travel like burrs on traveler’s pant legs. Story is the most reliable container for memory. These workshops connect one’s innate creative spark with deep-time storytelling and straightforward drawing exercises. Oral storytelling and image making exercises are braided together into each session. We go deep into old stories and myths to examine how they speak to our lives in the present day. Each weekend begins with a telling of a story. We build drawing exercises around the images in each story. Through discussion, exercises and critique, each participant creates their own image world from the stories.
This course is for anyone interested in unlocking their visual storyteller: teachers, writers, artists and the narratively curious. This is not about technical prowess, but storytelling and expression. The drawing exercises do not require previous training. Participants come away having created their own story based in image and text; gaining tools for telling stories with pictures and thinking in mythic time.
Saturday and Sunday 10AM-4PM
Weekends are full days of storytelling, drawing exercises and workshops.
APRIL 12-14, 2024:
The Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of the most iconic of Western stories. We look at what the story has to say about leaving home, coming home, and being a migrant in the world. What does that longing in our stories say about our own longing? Who is a migrant, a refugee, or a native? Our stories root us to the ground and allow us to travel over great distances.
JUNE 28-30, 2024:
River Stories
Stories from the Mabinogion, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Chinook stories about rivers, water spirits and the energy of moving water. We consider the energy of rivers at the Building Five site. History of the ironworks, the buried rivers of Portland and the Willamette and the Columbia.
SEPT. 7-8, 2024:
Tree Stories
Folktales from Pagan Europe, Indigenous stories from the Pacific Northwest about trees, forests and plants. We consider the presence of Forest Park that rises behind Building Five. Divinations from ravens, conversations with trees, and rivers that fall in love. These stories are remnants of old understandings between the non-human world and the human society. Can we restore our relationship with a living world in crisis if we hear the voices of other personages? Is it possible these old stories have been waiting for us to sit quiet and really listen?
NOV. 15-16, 2024:
Underworld Stories
It’s that time of year. Stories that guide us through the Underworld, visits to the land of the dead, ghost stories and divinations from beyond. Grief, uncertainty specific stories. The veil of the worlds is thin how do we enter into conversations with the spirit world? We go through the Underworld with Orpheus and Eurydice.
DEC. 13-14, 2024:
Homecoming Stories
What does it mean to come home? Journeys need to have a return. Stories of belonging, returning and finding place. How do we define home? Can we find stories in the ground beneath our feet that welcomes newcomers and honors the ancestors? Looking at Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home.