Aaron Morse Web of Life

Philip Martin Gallery is proud to present, "Web of Life," an on-line exhibition of new works by Aaron Morse. For over two decades, Los Angeles-based artist Aaron Morse has made spectacular, complex images of Australia, California and the American West.

Aaron Morse’s work engages with human and environmental concerns, often with a view toward our greater narratives about ourselves and the world in which we live. Morse's paintings and works-on-paper invite us to consider myth, nature and culture through dynamic compositions that combine their elements in colorful and complex layers.

"My goal is not to dominate the viewer or demand that they feel or see the view I'm presenting a certain way," Morse writes. "The art is living with ambiguity and contradictory assessments. I always try to make paintings that are rich but open, that might have a life of their own without me, images that can support multiple interpretations. In this way, like our lives and mediated histories."

Aaron Morse's paintings draw on textbooks, guidebooks and artwork produced by a range of peoples, at a range of time periods, from around the world. "I am drawn to the mutability and malleability of images, the way that an image or set of cliches might be altered and changed into another thing," Morse notes. "Paintings are real and unreal. My paintings, though broadly representational, are not so realistic as to be confused with reality, so what then is a Wild West or Sci-Fi image actually doing? It's emotional and symbolic, it calls upon our memories of other pictures, both overtly and subconsciously." Aaron Morse's work invites us to experience the sublime in the manner in which grand landscape paintings are designed to do, while at the same time asking us to consider the complexities of both image-making and narrative - as it has existed in past - and as we create it today.