Aaron Morse

Entitled The War is Over, Aaron Morse’s exhibition of paintings and oversized vertical watercolors portrays multi-figure action, landscape, as well as natural and man-made conflicts. Timeless struggles are explored through animals, vehicles, and iconic figures that become stand-ins for a host of ideas surrounding mythmaking, heroics, depravity, and man’s will against the overwhelming forces of nature. Vibrantly painted in a palette indicative of advertising and mass media, the work also reflects the mixed messages of a culture out-of-balance. While there are discernable casualties within Morse’s narratives, there are no clear winners.

Each work has evolved from the artist’s collection and divergent arrangement of photographs, illustrations, and personal digital imagery. The collage-like conflation of images within the work exemplifies the immediacy and accessibility made possible by the information age’s expanded field of resources. In works such as Peace Pipe, multiple images are compressed onto one canvas creating a series of distorted events that read both sequentially and pictorially as a singular composition. In it, a ‘coon skin capped pioneer encounters a growling bear, a Native American taken from the recent film ”The New World” appears central mid attack while the next panel returns to a more classic image of a colonist and a Native American smoking peacefully together in a prairie and finally, Colin Farrell is shown as John Smith lifting Pocahontas in a loving embrace. Similar to that of a movie trailer or storyboard, the picture’s underlying structure reveals a trajectory of action, climax, and rest, and then more action.

In both versions of The War is Over, two vertical watercolor paintings, there is a precise tension created between the declarative propaganda and the apparent contradiction of the chaotic scenes below. Airplanes fly throughout the sky dropping leaflets that fall upon a lion and lamb resting together amidst the chaos of a battlefield. The exact era and to which war the title refers remains ambiguous while the elongated vertical format grants space for multiple time and events to occur within the same picture, resulting in an effective alternative to the standard natural history index.

Aaron Morse was born in 1974 in Tucson, Arizona. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona, Tucson in 1996 and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio in 1998. Selected solo exhibitions include ACME, Los Angeles (2005) and (2003). Selected group exhibitions include MATRIX 213: Some Forgotten Place, Berkeley Art Museum (2004); Women Beware Women, Deitch Projects, New York (2004); International Paper, UCLA Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2003). He has recently published a lithograph for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Aaron Morse
THE WAR IS OVER