NYAB Event - Aaron Morse "Story of Man"

Aaron Morse "Story of Man"

This event has ended.
At Guild & Greyshkul
Media: Painting, Drawing, Other

This show continues several ideas from Timeline, my mural project at the Hammer Museum earlier this year. That project combined digitally printed, image-based wallpaper and over-painting to form a large scale, photo-collage that presented a "timeline of history." I was interested in an active, multi-part composition, similar to the Mexican muralist tradition, that featured recognizable and obscure figures in a reconstructed geometry--in this case a zigzag. Much of my work has been about creating alternate pictures from our received historical ones, but not with the goal of being revisionist. Factual accuracy, always debatable, is of less importance to me than an imaginative approach or curiosity about how history or pictures might be different. Paintings like Wilderness Epic, Old Farm, and Desert City depict a familiar national trajectory - the collision of peoples, agrarian America, post-industrial development and expansion - but are much more ambiguous about what conclusions can be drawn.
Many of my titles and subjects come directly from old books in my collection. "The Mountain that was God" is the title of a book from 1911 on Mt. Rainier in Washington State, which engages a long tradition of searching for the spiritual in nature. Both the book and the painting suggests that the mountain is supremely formidable and ecstatic, and its vertical format and gold color echo Renaissance religious painting.
- Aaron Morse