In a 2002 interview, the inimitable Kirk Varnedoe — looking back at his tenure as Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA — observed that “we like art because it gives us something to argue about,” not as a pithy aside, but offering insight as to how modern art empowered individual visions to frame and stimulate our culture. Art, he continued, provides something that connects you to a world “outside your own time frame, outside your own mortality,” and at the same time, “makes us be more aware of being alive and connects us more to our own time.” The first part of that quote is a phrase I often use at the start of my semester, to encourage dialogue from differing views as we examine those great artists of the past. These words, however, needn’t be confined to historical discourse alone, and it was that latter statement — connecting to individual versions of the world — which unexpectedly came to mind while visiting the current exhibition, Lights Out for the Territories at Philip Martin Gallery, with a small group of MFA students, generously hosted by the artist himself. A reminder that every once in a while you encounter work that provides another alternative— the kind that explores our collective mortality and echoes the most personal of histories.
The paintings of Aaron Morse offer a multi-layered means of connecting to the past, one that is both personal to the artist’s experience and, through that, connects with the artist’s larger questions of ecological concern. The specificity in his artistic language is grounded in his Southwest upbringing, such that anyone familiar with the terrain will understand the visual idioms which he speaks: the broad desert valleys sparely populated with scarred cacti, dried skulls and the iconic cowboy, all under the broad, cloud-filled skies that evoke the notion of ‘big sky country,’ or what the artist calls “Cloud World.” In a broader sense, we can also connect his work to others who follow this language, ranging from the precisionist-meets-surrealist desertscapes of modernist Georgia O’Keeffe to the chromatically charged landscapes of John McAllister, heir to Derain’s fauvist intensity. In the contemporary vein, Doug Aitken similarly tapped into an anti-nostalgic southwest sentiment in the show Psychic Debris Field at Regen Projects last winter. While Aitken’s paintings and multi-media installation seemed more geared toward a critique of contemporary urban sprawl — the incessant expansion into even the most barren of natural terrains — Morse blends past and present, building a continuum between the fictional nostalgia of the “old west” and the ecological scars left by humanity’s intrusion.
On view in “Lights Out for the Territories” at Philip Martin Gallery
Case in point, in Desert Mystery #2 the impossibly high horizon line creates a broad plain for this chronological survey, a stratified, disjointed scene that blends different moments in time in a curious continuous narrative. In the foreground, a broad-hatted figure leans over, dusting off fossilized bones peeking out from the desert sand; a portable transistor radio suggests a time a few decades before our own. To the figure’s right, a pair of cacti provides a barrier to monumental rocks with ancient carvings serving as pentimenti to contemporary graffiti now scarring the surface. Behind this miniature excavation, two men driving an early 20th century racecar flank an unridden mustang running at a full gallop barreling to the right. Finally, in the deepest background, at the highest elevation, the classic media trope of “Cowboy and Indians” plays out in front of a blue sky patterned with white marshmallow clouds. What are we to make of these heroic archetypes set in this fantastic diorama? Is that man in the foreground exhuming or exposing their flaws? Morse clearly knows the mythology, he’s working with and against it, and he’s asking what the landscape looks like now that the myth has had its way with it. The scenes unspool before you like those that might play in your imagination while driving across the desert, wondering who once traversed the landscape and what stories they might similarly unearth.
This is a theme Morse has long explored, in palettes ranging from the natural to the electric. The paintings flirt with a Pop aesthetic using graphic flat colors and outlined forms collaged over dense textures built of high-chroma contrasts. Where Desert Mystery #2 confines the sky to a narrow band near the top of the picture plane, other works reverse the equation entirely — the horizon drops, the sky dominates, and the compositions invoke the towering cloudscapes of the Dutch Baroque landscape tradition. If such an amalgamation of influences is not enough, in his new works Morse turns to explore what Captain James T. Kirk once called “the final frontier.” In Night of the Comet and The Leonids (both 2025), the Cloud World backdrop gives way to star-studded fields, complete with comets and falling stars. The collision of these registers is at first jarring but the dust soon settles. The eclectic cast of figures in Night of the Comet lining the horizon line suggests the various lofty interpretations given to such universal phenomena — as though the movements of the stars were solely concerned with forecasting the fate of humanity. This unexpected blend of Pop technique with a nod to an unfathomable, vertiginous sublime is a call for, perhaps, a little less hubris and a reminder of the ephemerality of our existence.
What are we to make of these heroic archetypes set in this fantastic diorama?
Throughout the exhibition, paintings shift in scale and subject, echoing the distorted perspectives within the compositions that create tension between the reality of the natural world and its commodification. The use of found images, comic book inspirations, and flat acrylic paint underscore this notion of replication. It is a condition Morse extends to a pair of collaged portrait works, where the machinery of image-making feels more exposed. In The Spring (2025), a dense cluster of portraits interrogates cultural definitions of beauty — the face as commodity, as aspirational product. More arresting still is Cosmological Figures (2026), in which a disconnected array of portraits and objects resists any single narrative, inviting instead the kind of projection brought to constellations — each culture finding its own heroes written in the same stars.
That Morse deploys the visual language of Pop — a technique born of mass consumption and the flattening of meaning — to render the frontier in all its forms, whether the so-called wild west or the cosmos beyond, is itself the argument he makes underneath these fictional narratives. A reminder that we have aestheticized the past and now even the infinite, packaged the sublime as readily as any other commodity. For those who have traversed these landscapes firsthand, the works offer a kind of imaginative homecoming, a sense of wonder at the unimaginable forces that shaped the beautiful scars of the desert landscape. For those whose experience is more remote, filtered through screens of various sizes and pixel counts, the works offer a new perspective. There is no denying the historical landscape is as complex as the delicate ecosystem that supports it. Morse doesn’t evade but evokes the past while layering, scarring, and ultimately destabilizing those timeworn mythologies, without stifling the imaginative exploration of such spaces. In connecting us to the past through the vehicle of the landscape, if one filtered through nostalgia and Pop, he ultimately turns the focus within and beyond such earthly confines.
Homepage image: Detail view of The Leonids, 2025