Morgan Canavan

Morgan Canavan’s exhibition, Calm, consists of three sculptural projects that register structures—financial, perceptual, and civic—by reworking residual imagery. In each work, form emerges as structure held and strained at a sculptural scale.

A painted aluminum sculpture, “Low-relief structure,” reproduces a coroplast sign that would have originally been nailed to a telephone pole, which the artist found in the streets of South Los Angeles in February 2021. Shredded and twisted flutes are now affixed in metal, and the surface is painted monochromatic yellow. The revised object throws in relief how the original graphic—reshaped by weather and site conditions— altered the sign’s material behavior.

The reverse side of a 2020 U.S. quarter—“Plein Air Sculpture, 1,578%”—has been enlarged fifteen-fold through nine successive silicone molds and plaster castings. The coin depicts an artist at work in the landscape, wryly imagining more pastoral scenery. Surface nicks from the coin were carefully reproduced, and the jump in scale moves the coin from a hand-held object to a wall-mounted relief. The work is cast in reinforced epoxy composite.

Ten green sculptures are mounted in sequence on the fence at Art Lot. These Calm bars were molded from four 30-pound zinc ingots bearing the lettering “Calm.” They were recast as hollow fiberglass shells and painted in a palette of automotive greens drawn from 1960s–1970s color catalogs. The repetition of the word “Calm” reads as a sage tonal refrain or heavy-handed industrial mantra. The works shift attention from metal’s density and standardization to its affective aesthetic residue.

An anecdote from last year feels formative to this exhibition: While mounting plywood on the fence to hang Canavan’s sculpture for Art Lot’s group exhibition “Hot!” in October, a passer-by asked if our bulletin board could host flyers protesting adjacent redevelopment around Carroll Gardens. Civic and financialized forces reshape objects we encounter. Stress might be considered an additional medium left out of the material descriptions of these works.

Morgan Canavan (b. 1989) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He has held two-person and solo exhibitions with Sweetwater, Berlin; Atlanta Contemporary; White Flag Projects Library, Saint Louis; Hester, New York; and Blood Gallery, Brooklyn. Canavan's work has been included in group exhibitions with Art Lot, Brooklyn; Bad Water, Knoxville; Storage Gallery, New York; Potts, Alhambra; Kimberly Klark, Queens; Honor Fraser, Los Angeles; VI Dancer, Oakland; and Chin's Push, Los Angeles. Canavan studied at the Malmö Art Academy, Yale Norfolk, and holds a BFA from the Cooper Union, New York.