Los Angeles artist Rebecca Morales’ work has struck a chord with prominent curators, critics and collectors. An in depth body of work was included in Gary Garrels’ 2007 exhibition, Eden’s Edge at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In the exhibition catalogue, Gary Garrels writes, “Rebecca Morales crafts astonishing drawings in gouache and watercolor on vellum – semitransparent, luminous sheets of specially treated calfskin.” Garrels continues, “These are not simply fantastic, private caprices, but rather are meditations on our perceptions of nature and humanity’s relationship with the natural environment.” And concludes, “Morales drawings suggest the complex weave of nature and civilization—the fragile tenacious, and ineluctable relationship in which humanity and nature are intertwined.”

On the occasion of Morales’ exhibition at Dan Weinberg Gallery, David Pagel wrote in the LA Times, “Morales draws like an architect, with laser-sharp lines that describe things so precisely you instantly think her abstract pictures depict real things in the real world. At the same time, Morales’ fantastically crafted abstractions get your imagination going in so many directions that you start to wonder why they’re neither maddening nor frustrating, but strangely serene in their own offbeat, exquisitely sensitive way.”

Rebecca Morales upcoming exhibition at BravinLee is comprised of two triptychs, Adjacent Plumes and Still Forest, painted on vellum, each measuring approximately 40×108 inches. In the second gallery Morales presents a layered sculpture, Milky Sea, made of polychromed bronze, cast resin and lithographs.

Morales renders the sensuality and character of manufactured and organic matter, suggesting how these natural forms relate to the more ephemeral and less measurable mental world of thoughts, emotions, and creativity. In the sculpture, Milky Sea, Morales explores the essence of organic life in bronze and resin and the process of work in lithographed texts. Morales’ assemblage implies nature persisting in ways not dissimilar to the forces behind the making of language and representation.

While There’s Calm illuminates the notion that between the natural and mental realms there is shared wilderness, and also, perhaps these works become a meditation on the significance and vulnerability of this un-reined world, remaining wild.

“Wilderness, remember, began where the Garden of Eden ended” -Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind