30 May 2008 to 29 June 2008
Hours : Thurs–Mon, 12-6pm
Opening: Friday, May 30 , 7–9pm
Jack the Pelican Presents
487 Driggs Ave
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
New York, NY
New York
North America
p: +1 646-644-6756
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w: www.jackthepelicanpresents.com
The paintings of both Heather Morgan and Ben E. Ward are powerful enough on their own. The combination is jolting!
To some it may seem problematic to juxtapose ghastly portraits of dead/dying Civil War soldiers with neurotic/erotic contemporary hipster girls, whose cosmopolitanism and ambivalence seem so very Weimar (that's Berlin at its most Berlin, between the wars). But somehow it works.
Heather Morgan's paintings are " a succession of vivid characters loosely based on the artist, her acquaintance, and recognizable cultural constructions; cigar-chomping chicks, androgynes, harlots, fighters, dancing queens, the starved, the tragically hip, the desperate (but not serious)." Her light touch and palette reminds one of Claude Monet's melodic sunlight drenches. Lucian Freud, Alice Neel...you see it in the work.
But don't be fooled. Here, it's ghostly pallor. These fashionable young women have been bruised and otherwise cut and damaged. Their self-possession is alive and perhaps highly sensual, but really their body language is not hard to understand-- stay the hell away !
Morgan thrusts their limbs into awkward, quirky positions. She similarly mangles our gaze, by pushing our noses way up into their personal space, where strange perspectival distortions occur--like in Matisse or Picasso, but more loaded. Hands are little and enfeebled. They're being examined--and they know it. They are sore with self-consciousness.
In striking contrast is the paternalistic gravitas of Ben E. Ward...or the trappings thereof. You believe it at first and it's all really horrible to imagine that some guy would make these glorified portraits of dead Confederate soldiers in all their gory grandeur. It's believable too. But then you realize, it's all a bit overdone.
For starters--you can breathe a sigh of relief now--they're not really dead. Those are just his friends posing. The anachronisms--the masterfully bombastic tonal effects, the heavy reverential frames and hallowed sentiments of 19th-century painting--(not to disparage their effectiveness) are all just a part of the texture of Ward's darkly absurd zombie movie.
His inspiration is the contemporary South. He is a white Southerner--born in Kentucky, raised in Alabama and just recently MFA'd in Savannah, Georgia. (He is an army brat, no less.) As Ward sees it, the heritage of that racist Civil War era just won't lie down and die. It's a still source of sick pride to so many.
In this body of work, the artist has taken at face value the inscription (Ezekiel 37:9) on the monument to fallen Confederate soldiers in the Savannah's Forsyth Park (ca. 1876) : Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live. What, he asks darkly, if those Confederate soldiers came back from the dead-- NOW?
Heather Morgan--after receiving her Yale MFA--spent four years in Berlin (and is represented there by Ladengalerie, the city's oldest gallery). She has had six solo shows in Berlin. This is her NYC solo debut.
Ben E. Ward is a recent MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design. In 2004, he attended the Florence Academy of Art. This is his first New York show and his solo debut
ALTERED STATES Adrian Hatfield & Joe Meiser
Jack the Pelican is pleased to present "Altered States," an exhibition combining the sculptures of Joe Meiser and the paintings of Adrian Hatfield. Both have exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. but are showing in New York City for the first time ever.
The show takes its title from the 1980s film, directed by Ken Russell, about a scientific researcher's disastrous investigations into states of consciousness.
Joe Meiser has built a personal mythology around his endeavors to achieve transcendence. Like the guy in the film, he makes a ritual of sensory deprivation. He descends into the tank. (He built it himself). His 'subjects' go in too (not at the same time). Like a scientist, he records.
But science is rooted in verification of the senses, he points out, and the immaterial which concerns him is necessarily beyond the senses. He is refreshingly straightforward about his observations and visions, as he is about the objects he makes.
The eight-foot-tall Homage to the Being of Light saturates the viewer with the experience. The giant horse welded out of steel came to him in a dream. The history of parapsychology and world religions are viewed through the lens of a contemporary American vernacular.
Adrian Hatfield shares Meiser's interest in the limits and possibilities of science and religion. He primarily focuses on how we infuse subjects of science with notions of the sublime rooted in the 19th century romantic tradition.
He notes that we cannot really see primitive life or faraway solar systems, but they seem so real to us. Colorizing effects are added to imagery harvested from the Hubble telescope to amplify and differentiate what can be seen. This is typical of how we digest vast amounts of data. How we imagine it is all so constructed.
Hatfield, in his paintings, hopes to engage the ingenuity, strength and inherent beauty of science's visual language, while simultaneously exposing its limitations.
He writes, "When I paint a prehistoric scene, I want it to be as fantastic as possible without becoming obvious fiction. The piece should operate not only as an alluring image, but also as a metaphor exposing our most trusted systems as simulacra."
In the end is our apprehension of something truly vast.
Joe Meiser and Adrian Hatfield met in the MFA program at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Meiser graduated in 2006, Hatfield in 2003. Meiser is currently an instructor at the School of Art at Bowling Green State University. Adrian Hatfield lives and works in Detroit.
