Morgan Blair
I’m interested in the relationship between highly personal,
specific, and familiar elements of our world and the surreal,
absurd-to-the-point-of-being-abstract bastardizations of those
elements that we generate and reflect back to ourselves through
the Internet. I collect stills from homemade craft tutorials on
YouTube, Craigslist “free stuff” photos, and children’s claymations,
for their common quality of being several times removed from
reality, both visually and conceptually. In studying and
manipulating these images, I both push them further into and
pull them back from abstraction. Shapes and compositional
elements tend to stretch and compress as I draw and redraw
them, from screenshot to Photoshop to paper to canvas. Filling
the shapes with hard-edged airbrushed gradients confuses
the spatial relationships between them, as some space flattens
out and some deepens, and I use clashing, saturated colors to
root the paintings in an alternate reality, maybe a spin-off of the
real world. And I use run-on, stream-of-consciousness titles,
combining personal, political, and pop culture references to
suggest new contexts for the final images.