Morgan Blair Exhibition

The Hole

This event has ended.

The Hole presents Morgan Blair’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, “I’m Holding a Sword. And an Axe. I’m Gonna Do Nothing”. Two years after her debut “TL;DR” she has created a substantial body of work over the past nine months to fill the entire gallery space with thirteen new paintings.

Ranging in size—and shape—from the petite to the immersive, these textured airbrush paintings continue to explore her world of gradient-crazed semi-abstraction. Originating as sketches in clay (yes, you read that right) the shapes and colors are enlarged onto the canvas into tightly taped-off areas of sprayed paint and sand; rectangle, square and tondo. As you can see above, Blair generates a huge amount of intense visual information, a tangle or thicket of irresolvable action.

With backgrounds like TV static and foregrounds of tasty sand bits, these paintings have a three-dimensional quality of form and color with volume but seemingly no mass. The hovering gradients have a screen-like quality of course but the shapes feel like torn and collaged bits, or yes, lumpy claymation forms. While her last show drew on Youtube tutorials, Craigstlist “free stuff” and screenshots from amateur claymation, this show is less about random internet junk and more purposefully “molded” through preparatory clay sketches. The titles as well are no longer spam word jazz but now are rambling sequential excerpts from a fictional autobiographical tell-all outside a Closeout Heaven.

Perhaps the shift since her last show has been away from randomness; chaos and order are not mutually exclusive, and that applies to visual information in an artwork as well. These works are not random, they are merely chaotic; 3D insanity set into paintings by the “strange attractor” of the artist. The show title is from a recovered childhood drawing of hers revealing perhaps a Hamlet-like indecisiveness (or Bartleby-esque passivity?). In the artist’s words: “Not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe this highly specific and slightly fucked up but hopefully funny thing is what’s happening in abstract painting. Or not.”