Margaret Morgan
Margaret Morgan
Spine, 2024
Acrylic, pencil, charcoal and collage on Arches Watercolor
60 x 40 in (152.4 x 101.6 cm)
64.5 x 44.5 in (163.8 x 113 cm) Framed
Margaret Morgan
Cords, 2023
Ink and colored pencil on Canson Infinity Arches Aquarelle Rag
44 x 34 in (111.8 x 86.4 cm)
48.5 x 38.5 in (123.2 x 97.8 cm) Framed
Margaret Morgan
Monstrous, 2023
Ink, colored pencil and collage on BFK Rives
44.25 x 30 in (112.4 x 76.2 cm)
48.75 x 34.5 in (123.8 x 87.6 cm) Framed
Margaret Morgan
Skin Milk, 2023
Mixed media, found twigs, cotton thread on raw linen44 x 34 in (111.8 x 86.4 cm)
45.5 X 35.5 in.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to present Margaret Morgan: Love Must Be Reinvented, a solo exhibition of text-based installations and works on paper. The exhibition runs from January 11 to February 22, 2025, with an opening reception from 4 to 7 p.m. on Saturday, January 11, 2025.
Love Must Be Reinvented; a prompt artist Margaret Morgan adopted from Godard’s film, Pierrot le Fou, in which the protagonist recites the poet Rimbaud whose invocation of “love reinvented” was set against bourgeois society’s hetero norms of marriage and family. For Morgan, well aware of the women’s varied roles, such a directive works within motherhood, not against it. Morgan states,
Domesticity and mothering are nothing if not creative—improvisational, performative, durational, an assemblage that can transform broken things into treasures: mothering knows how to make do. ‘Mothering’ is a term I use broadly to include all manners of caregiving and nurturance, maintenance, and actions sustaining life. These activities come from love, not hate. So yes, ‘Love Must Be Reinvented’—just not in the way Rimbaud intended.
Margaret Morgan: Love Must Be Reinvented brings together three distinctive series of framed works on paper and text installations developed through her praxis of walks in Griffith Park and her fascination with pareidolia—the ability to draw patterns and meaning out of random objects. Such ruminations have fostered an artistic impulse to create with daily discoveries—found twigs evoking letters of the alphabet, nurturing quotes distilled from classic literature, films, plays, sage affirmations, adopted images, and ephemera—collected and treasured to shape a visual vocabulary of Morgan’s own. Morgan’s poetic tour de force stands in her dedication to finding value in the everyday—from wandering hikes to raising children, communal acts of care, and salvaging—to evoke a multi-sensorial stream of consciousness of language, touch, sight, and emotions, drawn from fleeting moments that often go ignored.
Morgan hones in on the sense of touch and its vital connection to care, making, and creating as a means for reinventing love. Through collages featuring torn paper, drawings, photographs, and text works, the artist invites viewers to adapt practices of curiosity, looking for clues in the works and the daily world, finding letters in twigs and pictures in the clouds, and drawing meaning and comfort through the vagaries of life.
Margaret Morgan (b. 1958, Sydney, AU) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Morgan holds an MFA from University of California, Irvine, a BA from College of Fine Arts, UNSW, Sydney, Australia, and is an alumnus of The Whitney Independent Study Program at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Morgan has exhibited internationally. Notable exhibitions include Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, AU; Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine, CA; Women's Resource Center, UC Irvine, CA; Robert V. Fullerton Museum, California State University, San Bernardino, CA; Norwich School or Art, Norwich, UK; Avago Gallery, University of Sydney, AU; Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, AU; LAXART, Los Angeles, CA; Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, UK; Kunsthaus, Dresden, DE; Ohio State University Art Gallery, OSU, Athens OH; 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA; Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, ND; Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, AU; Baden-Wurtemburg Foundation, Stuttgart, DE; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Laguna Museum of Art, Laguna Beach, CA, amongst others.