Concurrent at Benrubi’s Project Space, Aaron Morse’s Elements of Geology comes with less eco-conceptual packaging than ALL THE WORLD and The Critical Zone but its vivid paintings suggest complex ideas. Incorporating both watercolors and acrylics, the paintings depict land- and seascapes as dense amalgams of hallucinatory color. The works’ constituent forms — mountains, trees, waves — are rendered in historical styles, such as Japanese woodcuts and nature-guide illustrations, crammed alongside and atop one another in slightly implausible configurations. Each form or group of forms is comprised of an even more implausible color: a sickly, pale pink mountain range; a minty cluster of turquoise and teal trees; seafoam streaked with shades of saffron and peach.
Morse’s offbeat, almost psychedelic color schemes hum with a radiation glow not unlike that of fellow eco-surrealist Alexis Rockman’s canvases. Yet despite its sense of tumult and discord, Morse’s work evinces little ecology anxiety. The manner in which his land- and seascapes appear out of whack reflect a sophisticated acceptance that nature has never been natural in the ways we like to imagine. The contrast between the exhibition title’s scientific literalness — Elements of Geology — and the works’ crazy quilt coloration drives home the point. In their deliberate unnaturalness, Morse’s paintings highlight the false dichotomy between nature and culture that underpins much contemporary ecological theory.
Neither too obvious nor too vague in its conceptualization, Morse’s work points up how terms like “ecological” and “environmental” can be deployed as an art branding strategy akin to the “green" label applied to consumer products. Vanguard theorists such as Timothy Morton emphasize how ecology as a concept implicates literally everything, but this capacious sense of the term can be a trap. An indistinct ecological anxiety understandably tinctures much of what we do and make these days; what matters, when it comes to art, is how and why this anxiety receives expressive form.
ALL THE WORLD by Davina Semo continues at Marlborough Contemporary (545 West 25th Street) through February 16; The Critical Zone by Katherine Wolkoff continues at Benrubi Gallery through March ; Elements of Geology by Aaron Morse continues at Benrubi Gallery (521 West 26th Street) through March.
