Guild & Greyshkul is pleased to present the second New York solo exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles based artist, Aaron Morse. Aaron Morse was born in 1974 in Tucson, Arizona. He received his BFA in 1996 from the University of Arizona, Tucson, and his MFA in 1998 from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. Solo exhibitions include those at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2007) and ACME, Los Angeles (2003, 2005, 2007). Morse’s paintings and works on paper have also been shown in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2007); the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS (2007); the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (2004); the Weatherspoon Arts Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro (2004); and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2003).

The following text represents an exchange of questions and answers between the gallery staff and Aaron Morse.

Q. What does the work in this exhibition grapple with?

A. 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.

Q. Please talk about your use of space.

A. A painting has a certain amount of surface that must be carved up in just the right way in order to be convincing spatially, even if the image is flat. Whether the picture is a cartoon or photo-realistic the space must be considered to be effective. I often use sharp diagonals when I compose an image in order to create a dynamic or expressive space. Japanese prints use shifts in scale, overlapping figures and atmospheric gradation to convey space and I sometimes borrow these ideas.

Q. What role does color, scale, and repetition play in your approach to painting?

A. I repeat and invert images as a way to experiment and upend the rules of a particular painting. Scale is often intuitive, what serves the subject. The palette for this show is somewhere between metallic and a color film negative; which conveys a darker mood and points out the abstraction of historic or pictorial subjects. My work may be at different times romantic, symbolist, or violent, densely overheated, or surreal, but I’m more satisfied when paintings work on numerous levels. Ideally a picture can be meditated on as a frozen image, as a formal painting and as a set of cultural ideas.

Q. How does photography figure into your work?

A. Photography is the industrialized, mechanical manufacture of images from the world. Photos, like paintings or drawings, have certain rules about how they come to be and what they do. If you can understand those technical qualities, all of these pictures become open to you as building blocks for more pictures. I appreciate photographs for their many painterly qualities and the resistance they have to becoming graphic, which creates a good tension with painting.

Q. Describe the process by which you choose images.

A. Sometimes seeing a picture in a book or elsewhere spurs an idea for a painting. Sometimes I have an idea and then I go about collecting the information to make that image. I try to look for images that are unusual or have undefined potential. However, even clichéd or hackneyed pictures can sometimes be very useful when reworked in another context.

Q. How do you think future generations will perceive our current time period?

A. As primitive, but interesting. If we make it out of the next few centuries as a species we’ll probably appreciate the technological jumps made between 1850 and 2000, but much of everyday life is still pretty basic and governed by early 20th century inventions that have not changed that significantly—like the light bulb, telephone and the internal combustion engine. Yes we have the internet, but our whole concept of how to organize ourselves (here I’m thinking particularly as Americans) is still beholden to post-war, Eisenhower era systems of freeways, suburbs, strip malls and the like. Sometimes I’m driving on the freeway and look at all the cars and the city and think it just seems so out of date. But the intellectual and artistic output during our time has been remarkable and inspiring.

Q. If you had to come up with an image to represent the world that is not a globe or a map what would it be?

A. How about origami? Something multifaceted that can fold and unfold, perhaps transform. On each fold time and geography could be represented.

Q. Why did you decide to have us install this exhibition?

A. It’s true I usually install my own work, but I also enjoy seeing how others interpret what I am doing. It’s vitally important to me actually, given the production months of hermit-like sequester. Compared to the installation of my last exhibition, for this show in particular, all the work and ideas are in the pictures themselves, so there is hardly an incorrect way to display them granted there is light to see.