Jenny Morgan
To Bathe the World in a Strange Light
April 17 - May 23, 2021

Mother is pleased to present: To Bathe the World in a Strange Light, Jenny Morgan’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The show comprises new oil paintings and features Morgan’s first foray into landscape. The show runs from April 17 through May 23, 2021. Mother Gallery is located on the ground floor of 1154 North Avenue in Beacon, New York.

To Bathe the World in a Strange Light was scheduled to open in March 2020. The original exhibition included six paintings that were never exhibited, yet found homes over the course of the year. As the pandemic raged, To Bathe the World in a Strange Light took on new form. The body of work was spurred by medieval iconography and historical painting. Morgan incorporated a molting Woma phyton as a companion to the figure of her doppelgänger—depicting woman from within and without art history—in repose, unabashed and embodied, but neither madonna nor odalisque.

The Devotional, in monochromatic emerald hues, centers a reclining nude— commanding the gaze to her hand—challenging assumptions about the nude female portrait while celebrating elements of what has gone before. The serpent, often associated with evil, is a symbol of transformation and the creative life force. In Emerson's Nature, 1836, he compares the return to innocence with a snake casting off its slough: “In the woods, a (wo)man casts off her years, as the snake its slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child.”

Morgan’s diaphanous paintings are inhabited by hyper-realistic figures ebbing in and out of focus, merging into landscape or diffusing gently into a painterly fog. There is a razor’s edge quality in the calm precision of Morgan’s deliberate brush stroke, which can be quick and expressive as well as invisible and exact. These new paintings in To Bathe the World in a Strange Light employ symbolism to expand the idea of “heaven on earth.” Longing for nature and play while under quarantine in the city, Morgan journeyed through historical landscape painting, notably, the Hudson River School, Baroque, and Rococo. In The History of False Pleasures, Morgan depicts hands holding an undulating serpent and its double intertwined in a visual chiasmus—over the navel—a portal opens to reveal a hidden landscape. At the center of this landscape a transparent eyeball hovers above a winding pastoral path.

Referencing Fragonard’s The Swing, 1775-80, as a source for Entering The Field at Night, Morgan depicts a psychic energy that has been freed from her corporeal form, crossing from matter to spirit. Free to wonder, she floats in a liminal, twilit landscape, like a flower in full bloom, she basks in her own shimmering light. In Sleep, the same face lies in rest nestled among sinuous roots. Loosely referencing Asher Brown Durand, The Catskills, 1856, nature and body converge signaling regeneration through rest and reflection.

The three muses are depicted standing serene in To Bathe the World in a Strange Light. Rendered in dramatic chiaroscuro, they inhabit a verdant and fecund universe. The focal point, moving toward the moment their hands nearly touch, diffuses into rings of graded light. The concentric circles reference a medieval motif for the order and structure of the cosmos. For Morgan “Intertwining and overlapping the landscape with the body was a way to deepen the understanding of why we need nature and our biological connections to earth, eros, creation, and belonging.” In this new body of work, Morgan examines the elemental relationship between human connection, collective power, and the natural world.

“Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye- ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of..“ -Emerson

-Paola Oxoa, April 2021

Jenny Morgan (b. in 1982 Salt Lake City, Utah) holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, New York. Morgan’s diaphanous paintings are inhabited by hyper-realistic figures that ebb in and out of focus, sometimes merging into landscape or diffusing gently into a painterly fog. Her newest work draws inspiration from medieval painting, historical landscape, and uses symbolism to expand on the idea of ‘heaven on earth.’ These works examine the elemental relationship between human connection, collective power, and the natural world. Morgan’s work has received critical attention in numerous publications including articles in Whitewall, Hi-Fructose, The Village Voice, The Denver Post, and the cover feature of Juxtapoz in May 2015. She celebrated her first solo museum exhibition “Skin Deep” with The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO in 2017. Her 2013 solo exhibition ‘How To Find A Ghost’ was named one of the top 100 fall shows worldwide by Modern Painters in 2013. Morgan has realized several portraiture commissions for publications including The New York Times Magazine and New York Magazine. Morgan has had solo exhibitions in New York, London, Colorado, Utah, Indiana, New Mexico, and has been in numerous group exhibitions including at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the 92Y Tribeca in New York City and Postmasters Gallery in Rome. Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Muskegon Museum of Art, Purdue University Art Gallery, University of Maryland’s Stamp Student Union Art Collection, New Mexico State University, Flint Institute of Arts as well as major private collections throughout the world. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.