DONALD MORGAN | Triangle Pusher | February 23 – March 22, 2025

“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.” — Donald Morgan

“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.” — Donald Morgan

“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.” — Donald Morgan

“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.” — Donald Morgan