Donald Morgan

Devening Projects is pleased to present Triangle Pusher, Eugene, Oregon-based artist Donald Morgan’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition opens on Sunday, February 23rd with a reception for the artist and continues until March 22nd.

“My work engages a range of themes, including humor, mortality, superstition, and literature. The latter functions as a loose, yet connective thread throughout much of my practice. I think of the small works on paper in this exhibition as sharing an affinity with, or having allegiance to, short stories, poems, and three-minute songs. The drawings often take their titles from the books on my shelves. Furthermore, the action of each drawing is almost always confined to a rectangle the exact size of a paperback.

My practice is influenced by what I read, but also stakes out visual territory untethered to those sources. For instance, while certain drawings are intentionally responsive to the structure of poems or deliberately stress a kind of visual congruency with the mood of a short story, other drawings unfold along paths where such connections to source material become tenuous or unavailable. Along these paths, I might find myself reconfiguring aspects of artworks in the world that I admire, or allowing chance “studio accidents” to reroute the direction of a drawing. This process-based approach is characterized by manipulations and amplifications of formal tensions that are at once conjoined with and irreducible to whatever initial spark or reference the work sprang from, or points toward. The work occupies richly dissonant semiotic and syntactical territory, pointing crookedly away from itself while simultaneously turning inward via astute compositional dynamics. These dynamics play out through flatness vs. illusory depth, figure-ground relationships that sometimes behave and sometimes don’t, compelling juxtapositions of different patterns and textures, and the lively interplay between collage and various kinds of mark-making. The drawings are highly tuned pictorial events—dexterous and wry.

An interest in the similarities and differences between written works and visual works informs my practice. Previous bodies of work are all more or less grounded conceptually in a highly focused, adaptive strategy in which I respond interpretively to specific works of literature or other written sources, including novels, guides to foraging wild food, and ancient Egyptian funerary texts. While these previous works are ostensibly grounded in the sources they spring from and are “about” those books in a general sense, they diverge from any reductive impulse to illustrate the essentials of a story or boil it down to its core. Instead, they favor a kind of lyrical, improvisational process geared toward an expansive formal complexity. The recent drawings for this exhibition build upon this methodology, and beyond it, in an even looser, more free-form manner. This looser approach, as well as the fact that these drawings are much faster to execute than sculptures, and furthermore have the kind of representational and illusory capabilities that sculpture is deficient in, has led to a kind of stylistic range and visual impulsivity that was not present in my sculptures(which are largely hard-edged and use uninflected planes of monochrome color). So there is a certain conceptual linkage between these drawings and my previous work, and there is absolutely a linkage in terms of getting things to look right in a formal sense, but the drawings have veered into new visual territory that I am very engaged with.

Throughout my practice, I’ve always been concerned with the viewer’s immediate, experiential encounter with the work in relation to the body. The majority of my pieces borrow their dimensions from familiar, everyday items in our immediate environment that we routinely interact with. Many of my sculptures are sized according to things such as paper grocery bags, bookshelves, end tables, workbenches, etc. Paintings are usually sized to the exact dimensions of windows or screens, though I rarely explicitly represent those items, preferring an indirect, or off-kilter, sense of familiarity to occur. In this manner, the work is “passive-aggressively” interactive, facilitating a particular sensory resonance to one’s in-person experience of the work. This strategy carries over into my drawings for this exhibition, through sizing most of the drawings according to the dimensions of paperbacks—intimate objects that one knows by sight and touch.”

Donald Morgan, born in 1969, has been exhibiting his sculptures, paintings, and drawings nationally and internationally for over twenty-five years. He has had solo exhibitions in New York at Grid Space; in Milwaukee at The Green Gallery and General Store; in Minneapolis at SOO Visual Arts Center; in Springfield, Oregon at Ditch Projects; and in Portland, Oregon at Fourteen30 Contemporary, RocksBox Fine Art, and the Portland Biennial, curated by Michelle Grabner. He has a forthcoming solo show in Portland at SE COOPER Contemporary.

He has been in group exhibitions in New York at White Columns, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and Pat Hearn Gallery; in Los Angeles at Roberts and Tilton, China Art Objects, and Human Resources; in Wichita, KS at the Ulrich Museum; in Cairo at the Palace of Fine Art; and in Zurich at Karma International, among many others. He has had residency fellowships in Peterborough, NH at MacDowell and in Ucross, WY at the Ucross Foundation. Most recently, he was a resident at the Poor Farm in Little Wolf, WI. He has been reviewed or received mentions in ARTFORUM, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, New Art Examiner, Minneapolis Star Tribune, ART WEEK, and The Oregonian, among others. He is the recipient of a Hallie Ford Fellowship and numerous grants and awards from the Oregon Arts Commission and The Ford Family Foundation. He lives and works in Eugene, OR, where he is an Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of Oregon. He received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in 2001.