KRISTEN L. MORGIN

EDUCATIONMFA Degree – Alfred University, School of Ceramics

Alfred, NY1995-1997

BA Degree – California State University, HaywardHayward, CA1990-1993

EXHIBITION HISTORYSOLO SHOWS2009 Cellos

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CAThe Exhibition Formerly Known as Passengers: 2.7Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA

2008 objects for everyone i have ever knownMarc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA

2006 Untitled ExhibitionMarc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA

2004 The Third MovementViento y Agua Gallery, Long Beach, CA.

2001 The Ticking Elephant and Other Surviving Excerpts of the Hope SymphonyCuesta College Art Gallery, San Luis Obispo, CA

GROUP SHOWS2007 Unmonumental : The object in the 21st Century

The New Museum , 235 Bowery, New York, NYSculptors’ Drawings: Ideas, Studies, Sketches, Proposals, and MoreAngles Gallery, Santa Monica, CAHammer Contemporary Collection : Part IIUCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.Red Eye: LA Artists from the Rubell Family CollectionRubell Family Collection, Miami, FL

2006 RAWNorthern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN

2005 The 3RD World Ceramic Biennale 2005 KoreaTrans-Ceramic-ArtBeyond MediumIcheon World Ceramic Center, Icheon, KoreaThing: New Sculpture from Los AngelesUCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.61st Ceramic AnnualRuth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont, CA

2004 UnsceneryRaid Projects, Los Angeles, CANow HereThe Brewery Project, Los Angeles, CABecause the EARTH IS 1/3 DIRTColorado University Art Museum & The Colorado CollectionBoulder, COPlay PauseSCA Gallery, Pomona, CA

2003 UnsceneryCypress College Art Gallery, Cypress, CA

2002 Faculty Biennial: Who Inspired You?University Art Museum, Long Beach, CAThe Body::Minded Problem in the 21ST CenturyMax L. Gatov Gallery, Long Beach, CANew TerritoryBelger Art District, Kansas City, MO

2001 To Be ContinuedCerritos College Art Gallery, Cerritos, CA.Menagerie at NCECA 2001Gaston College Galleries, Dallas, NCMenagerie: Animal Imagery in Contemporary CeramicsCovivant Gallery, Tampa, FL

2000 Long Beach 2000, Faculty BiennialUniversity Art Museum, Long Beach, CAMenagerieKirkland Arts Center, Kirkland, WA.

1999 Common ThreadsDiane Nelson Fine Art Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA

1998 Five Sculptors / Figurative WorkDiane Nelson Fine Art Gallery, Laguna Beach, CAInternational Contemporary CeramicsFrom the Igal and Diane Silber CollectionLaguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA

1997 MFA Thesis ExhibitionFosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred, NY

SLECTED BIBLIOGRAPHYEXHIBITION CATALOGUESWorld Contemporary Ceramics: Trans-Ceramic-ArtThe 3rd World Ceramic Biennale 2005, KoreaCopyright 2005 by the World Ceramic Exposition Foundation

Thing: New Sculpture from Los AngelesPublished by the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural CenterCopyright 2005 by the Regents of the University of California and the Fellows of ContemporaryArt 2005 Scripps College 61ST Annual Ceramics ExhibitionPublished by the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps CollegeCopyright 2005 by the Trustees of Scripps Collegebecause the EARTH IS 1/3 DIRTPublished by the CU Art Museum, University of Colorado at BoulderCopyright 2004 by the Regents of the University of Colorado/ CU Art MuseumARTICLES AND EXHIBITION REVIEWSChang, Richard. “Maybe the next big thing”. The Orange County Register.March 6, 2005. pp. 1, 4.Knight, Christopher. “ The next big ‘Thing’ in L.A.”. The Los Angeles Times.February 9, 2005. pp. E1, E6.Roug, Louise. “ The (quirky) object’s the thing for a fresh crop of sculptors”. The Los AngelesTimes. January 2, 2005. pp. E41, E48-E49.Brumer, Andy. “Where clay gets a chance to make a big impression”. The Los Angeles Times.January 27, 2005. pp. E21.Harvey, Doug. “ Good Thing”. LA Weekly. February 4-10, 2005. pp.32-33.Miles, Christopher. “The Idolaters’ Revenge ; New Los Angeles Sculpture”. Flash Art.Vol. XXXVIII. No. 242. May-June 2005. pp.104-108.

AWARDS2005 Joan Mitchell Award

COLLECTIONSLowell and Lucille MorginDiane and Igal SilberRubell Family CollectionDean ValentineUCLA Hammer MuseumAlfred UniversityLos Angeles County MuseumMandy and Clifford Einstein

Culture Monster ALL THE ARTS, ALL THE TIME

Art review: Kristin Morgin at Marc Selwyn Gallery December 19, 2009

Seven life-size cellos, each more battered than the

last, greet visitors to Marc Selwyn Fine Art, where

the lights have been turned low. Supported by

makeshift bases cobbled together from old boxes

and wood scraps, each damaged instrument stands

upright, like a person in a silent choir or an ornate

memorial wreath at a group funeral.

Melancholy does not merely waft into the

atmosphere from Kristen Morgin's elaborately

crafted clay, wire and wood sculptures. It pours

forth in torrents, filling the gallery with sadness

that it is palpable and almost unbearable.

And that's just the beginning. The powerful first impression made by the L.A.

artist's loaded works from 2001 gives way to less obvious, more nuanced

emotions. They simmer slowly and resonate deeply.

To look closely is to notice how different Morgin's sculptures are from real

cellos. Aside from their profiles, which are fairly exact matches, especially in

their gracefully curved bodies and slender, sexy necks, her homemade

sculptures share very little with the real thing.

That is intentional. As an artist, Morgin is not a Realist who tries to trick

viewers into thinking that her works are indistinguishable from actual objects.

She is a Romantic, an unsentimental dreamer who believes that art comes alive

only when it reaches a viewer's emotions – and that artifice is the best way to

get there.

Some of her cellos are crude surrogates, rough remakes seemingly lashed

together by a castaway struck by its unforgettable beauty. Others look as if they

have been repaired so many times, like 1950s American cars in Cuba, that they

have become something else altogether. Still others evoke crime-scene

reconstructions or recall barnacle encrusted artifacts dragged up from the

murky depths.

"Cello #9" appears fire-damaged. A clay bird nests in "Cello #3." "Cello #2" is

stuffed full of mud balls, all tangled in a wiry web. "Cello #4" looks skeletal and

"Cello #8" seems to be as fragile as ash, about to disintegrate in the wind.

All of Morgin's cellos appear to have endured well beyond their best years,

persisting in the face of great difficulty and reconciling themselves to

diminished expectations. Pragmatic and wise, they capture the tenor of our

times.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 101, (323) 933-9911,

through Jan. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.marcselwynfineart.com

Image: "Cello #2." Credit: Courtesy of the Marc Selwyn Gallery.

KRISTEN MORGIN AT MARC SELWYN FINE ART BY CHRISTOPHER MILES Published on December 30, 2009

I can’t think of a better way to close this decade than to write about a show by an artist who, much to my honor, taught at the same school with me for the last 10 years. If that bit of info, and the added fact that I curated her into an exhibition a few years back, tempt you to take my enthusiasm with a grain of salt, so be it, but I don’t think I’d be doing my job if I didn’t encourage you to make it out to this remarkable exhibition by Kristen Morgin. The seven sculpted cellos (all from 2001) that populate this exhibition descend from both a tradition of figurative sculpture and the tradition of the ceramic vessel being a metaphor for the body. In fact, the equation here between the instrument’s form and the human figure is so palpable as to bring

to mind Magritte’s assorted imagery mashing together Homo sapiens and violin-family anatomy, or Man Ray’s photo of the model/muse Kiki with “f” holes painted on her lower back. But Morgin’s forms, made of stabilized but unfired clay over armatures of wood and wire, take the uncanny that became intellectualized and eroticized in the hands of the surrealists, and turn it into something with a kind of guttural gravitas. They have a quality suggestive of rotted crates or rusted cans, as well as decaying bodies, and their sculptural kin ultimately are more that of

Giacometti’s often solitary figures. They have about them a profoundly tragic presence, which few artists would any longer aspire to, and that fewer still could begin to pull off without either a glib smirk or a flush of sentimentality. With their suggestion of great age, it’s easy to see Morgin’s cellos as exercises in nostalgia, but the more time you spend with them, the more they seem dead-set on the future, on literally trying to continue holding it together in the instances in which their shells actually function as vessels or containers, and on new possibilities, as in the case of one cello, whose body, well past its playing years, now serves as a birdhouse, with a finch or sparrow perched in a spot analogous to the location of the heart in a human torso. Among the most stirring of vanitas works made by any artist at present, they remind us of the dirt from which we come and to which we return, but they also are resolute, insisting upon being, even if in decay, and refusing to crumble without a fight. Standing as if in stride, they move forward in the world. When one stands among them, the sense of empathy is palpable, as if they are actually resonating and their waves of sound are hitting your flesh. But their music is actually something that wells up within you, low and drawn — something like Old Ansign.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art: 6222 Wilshire Blvd., Ste. 101, L.A.; Tues.-Sat., 11a.m.-6p.m., through Jan. 23. (323) 933-9911, marcselwynfineart.com.

Looking At Los Angeles: Against The Deluge December 30th, 2009 by Catherine Wagley

Looking back before moving forward is such an endearing habit—like brushing your teeth before breakfast—that it’s hard to resent the sweeping, often grandiloquent judgments that accompany the end of each year (last year, when Daniel Birnbaum called a documentary by Alexander Kluge “a labyrinth as absorbing as any great cultural work of the past century,” I was more than willing to embrace the hyperbolic praise as truth). But now, at the close of a decade in which art often moonlighted as a history project and calculated reticence often seemed more provocative than raw expression, looking back seems especially difficult because looking back is what much of the decade’s art tried to do.

Charged with the thorny task of reviewing ten years’ worth of art, critic Jerry Saltz came up with a strange combination of showmanship and doom. Writing in New York Magazine, he pinpointed Jeff Koons’s towering, endearingly overstuffed Puppy (the version that debuted at Rockefeller Center in June

2000) as the decade’s turning point, “an artifact from the last days of ‘the end of history.’” Appearing a year before 9/11, Koons’s sculpture was an over-ambitious attempt to make guilelessness monumental. It embodied a lighthearted moment of spectacle that would begin to lose its footing (even though as it continued to hold its own in art markets). Puppy, according to Saltz, “laid a beautiful, ghastly laurel wreath at our doorstep. If it could speak, it would say, ‘After me, the deluge.’”

But if Koons’s flower-coated monster represented the end of a certain kind of spectacle (and I think Saltz is right in suggesting that it did, though misguided, perhaps, in the esteem he awards it), then it’s the art that came after Puppy that deserves attention. The decade should belong to artists who saw the supposed deluge as a reason to stop trying to make history and start rephrasing, breaking apart, and rearranging their cultural heritage, freeing repressed fragments of meaning in hopes of informing an unknown future.

Collier Schorr’s Jens F. project still stands out to me as an eloquent example of this sort of rephrasing. Schorr (Season 2) restaged Andrew Wyeth’s portraits of his muse Helga, placing an adolescent boy in feminine poses, subtly turning his body in ways that seemed difficult and unnatural. She treated appropriation, not as something

transgressive, but as something tenderly introspective and revealing. Another example, Elad Lassry’s self-described post-picture generation work, is fugitive in that it liberally borrows from commercial iconography. But it’s professional in its sleek, minimal distillation of the ideologies latent in each image. For Lassry and for Schorr, wading through our lineage of cultural imagery isn’t just a prerequisite to moving forward; it’s actually a way of interacting with present and future.

Fittingly enough, Los Angeles has ended the decade with its galleries and museums brimming with art that looks back. At LACMA, a whole exhibition of landscape photography from 1975—New Topographics—has been rephrased. The motivation: simply acknowledging art’s “ongoing concern for man’s use of the land.” On the second floor of Steve Turner Contemporary, Amir Zaki collected antique images, spanning from 1870-1950, of Southern California’s evolution, curating a mini-visual history. At Blum & Poe, Drew Heitzler has remixed films from the ‘60s, removing the narrative arc in order to emphasize strange movements and interactions that plot once repressed.

One of the most resonant exhibitions I’ve seen, however, branches away from image-driven rephrasals of history. Kristen Morgin’s Cellos, clay sculptures currently on view at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, are pragmatic, systematic, and yet unnervingly visceral. Built onto wood and wire armatures, the Cellos give the illusion of being exquisitely accurate and proportionate. They are arranged in rows, like museum specimens, and they occupy a dimly lit room. The dry, unfired clay gives the surface of each instrument a rough texture and each instrument evidences a different stage of disintegration. It’s as if Morgin took one delicate, aging artifact and remade it again and again to see how far she could push before it dissipated completely, leaving only residue. It never does decay, however—at least, not entirely–and its presence

in the gallery seems to ensure its preservation, even if only as a metaphor for what art might look like over time.