WORE! is frightening and beautiful.

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?