Tyler Morgan

Excavation

SPRING/BREAK Art Show

625 Madison Ave, NYC Booth #1159

September 7th - September 12th 2022

For the 2022 edition of SPRING/BREAK in NYC, Take Care selected a solo presentation by the New York artist Tyler Morgan.

Formally, a multitude of references cascade throughout this work. On the walls, the negative space of small-scale prints from a family album depicting a child, a young white male body, have been etched out to reveal a white ground. These personal images of the artist himself are mounted among English Ivy toile wallpaper, first introduced in the 18th century, and recreated for this exhibition. In its initial form, the wallpaper was found to be a toxic material due to the pigments, and the ivy itself became an invasive species. In the middle of the room, sits a vitrine that was once used in the V&A Museum in London, and holds many of the tools used to etch the photographs, along with remnants of removal. It also includes the 35mm camera used to capture the images, and a family album. The formal analogues to renaissance moments are abundant, but it is the space between them that the conceptual analogue truly takes hold.

All together, they resonate as a foregrounding of the gaze, a subtly disquieting review of surroundings that shape and inform the strangeness of looking, while provoking a clear eyed critique of white supremacy, which considering our continually devastating news cycle, is entirely urgent. The title of the installation, Excavation, is also the title of Willem de Kooning’s famous paradigmatic AbEx work held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Tyler earned his MFA. As a work of a particular canon, this painting found an identity as a heroic symbol of masculine depth. Tyler’s Excavation subverts this view, and moves in another direction, toward a vulnerable exhumation of context and social infrastructure of the very power that maligned forms of queerness, and the under exposed canons that we now see today, revised and revisited with one another.