I’ll see you in Disneyland | Joel Morrison
April 21st - June 2nd, 2023
Alon Segev Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Joel Morrison. It is the American artist’s third show in Israel since 2016.
The exhibition will feature five new sculptures and four large silk-screen and mixed-media works on paper. Culling imagery that ranges from Cinderella’s castle, The Beach Boys, Serena Williams, The Sex Pistols, Elvis, to Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed, Meghan Markle, Prince, NATO, and The Ramones, Morrison filters this bounty through his distinctive vision, a rapid-fire visual cornucopia that elides Southern California irreverence, art historian-accuracy and exquisite cultural savant. Morrison manipulates simple, easily recognizable symbols, objects, and images familiar from the world around us, deftly architecting them to create a spellbinding kaleidoscope of shifting meanings, where the collage becomes the object that engages the viewer in a mesmerizing tornado of thoughts, memories, and ideas. A razor blade walk through contemporary life, from politics to cancel culture, accompanied by the insistent musical earworms that soundtrack our experience, Morrison’s work prompts a conversation that pokes at the tenuous connections exacerbated by the experience of a global pandemic, dissecting, exploring and, occasionally, imploding them.
“This is West Coast Art,” says Morrison. “It links the idea of the simple and the fantastic with an aura of dangerous sophistication and complex misunderstanding.”
The centerpiece of the exhibition “Rap Isn’t Music, It’s Just Not - Jerry Garcia, 2023” takes its name from a quote from Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist, and vocalist of The Grateful Dead. Culled from a 45-minute interview taped for “The History of Rock and Rock,” a 578-minute documentary that aired on public television and in syndication in 1995, it superimposes the eclectic American rock band’s symbol, a stylized red, white and blue skull, over a black and white collage depicting The Altamont Speedway Free Festival, whose chaos — and fatalities —were blamed on the presence of the Hell’s Angels. Emphasizing the discordance are 2 7” inch single-size records affixed with a silhouette of an African-American B-Boy caught in a gun’s crosshairs, the logo for the hip hop group Public Enemy; their hits, including “Don’t Believe The Hype” and “Fight The Power,” weaving yet another dimension of meaning into the work.
“I’ll See You In Disneyland, 2023” layers a red pentagram over an inverted silk-screened image of Mickey Mouse, Pluto, and Goofy cavorting in front of the iconic image of a castle as imagined by Disney, first seen in “Cinderella,” released in 1950, and now disseminated around the world as the brand’s unmissable logo. A hand-machined 36-inch chrome record labeled Beach Boys, “Time To Get Alone” from their 20/20 album released in 1969 suggests the Pandora’s Box of darker currents — like the Manson Family Murders that erupted during that candy-floss last summer of the Swinging Sixties, ensuring the violent demise of a carefree existence.
“God Save The Queen (My Serene Highness), 2023” overlays a pentagram of Venus — i.e., the planet’s flower-shaped orbit as perceived from Earth — over a silk-screened photograph of tennis star Serena Williams holding aloft the Venus Rosewater dish she received after her 2012 three-set victory over Agnieszka Radwanska in the women’s singles championship match at Wimbledon in 2012. In place of the circular award, Morrison has imposed an oversized chrome record of “God Save The Queen” by The Sex Pistols. A collage of figures from the contemporary British Monarchy, including Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed, Megan Markle, and the late Queen Elizabeth II, comprise the background to this arresting central image. “In the US, we don’t have royals anointed through their bloodline,” Morrison explains. “We crown our kings and queens through their pop success in music where it’s often literal — Elvis the King. Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul. Prince. Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, Queen Bey — and in sports. Serena Williams, who retired in September 2022 and was one of our greatest athletes.”
In “Sculpture for NATO, 2023” a Belgian news article from the 1950s about the oxidized steel structure known as the “Star Sculpture” that has stood outside the Alliance’s headquarters in Brussels, Belgium since August 1971, has been enlarged and silk-screen printed in neon pink. It’s overlaid with a 24-inch single song-sized computer-carved black nickel-plated aluminum record of The Ramone’s “Rocket To Russia” from 1977.
In “Aspen And The Big Screw, 2023”, Morrison forges a classic Greek bust from decidedly untraditional materials. Here, oversized screws, car decals, and, as a finishing touch, a luxury septum piercing invert the solemnity of those ponderous sculptures.
“Giant Nail with Diamond, 2023”, created from stainless steel, riffs on the artist’s drawing in space series, twisting a simple nail and inflating it to gargantuan proportions. Taking a cue from the French jeweler’s “Just un Clou” series, it revisits an everyday, oft-ignored object and, by amplifying it and studding its head with computer-cut, stainless steel “diamonds,” reinvents it. “It takes the idea of the perfectly fabricated and abstracts its perfection,” Morrison explains.
Three of the works, “Hey Look at Me I’m A Big Fat Shiny Diamond (Step Cut), 2023”, “Hey Look at Me I’m A Big Fat Shiny Diamond (Princess Cut), 2023”, and “Hey Look at Me I’m A Big Fat Shiny Diamond (Trillion Cut), 2023”, process, consists of weather balloons inflated within cages whose designs abstract the intricate shapes of the faceted gems, nods to Jeff Koon’s “Diamond”. Instead of degrading Koons’ work, Morrison simultaneously abstracts it and critiques it via a taunting, virtuoso sword of impeccable technical skills and artistic complexity, running lightening fast circles around it that interrogate a canon of art that deifies work pumped out in multi-editions, financed by corporations and produced by a coterie of assistants. “This is the power of creativity, to critique and question.”
Yet, the artist himself foists the answers to these provocative thoughts in the hands of the viewers. “My job as an artist is not to force meaning, it is to communicate interesting scenarios and raise questions,” Morrison emphasizes.
© Joel Morrison. Photography: Elad Sarig
