Ivan Morley's paintings are inspired by the frontiersman's lore of scrappy, dried-out California towns with names like San Gabriel, El Monte, and Tehachapi. Such locales and their all-but-forgotten (and possibly artist-fabricated) histories--if you can call tales of memorable cockfights and observations on the behavior of squirrels histories-seem unlikely sources of inspiration. Yet, from a mass of myth, a dose of his own vivid imagination, and a range of raw material, Morley has created some mighty idiosyncratic pictures. The show as a whole was pulled together with a keen sense of detail, with texts telling a few of the stories rendered carefully on the walls.Ivan Morley's complex, color-saturated paintings are visual extrapolations made within an associative game that starts with history. Born in Burbank, Calif. in the mid-1960s--seemingly a time and place of little history--Morley begins his work by excavating obscure anecdotes from Los Angeles's mid-19th-century frontier past. By painting exploratively on a variety of surfaces, including textured glass, wood panels, batik and dyed canvas, Morley expands the scope of his investigation beyond the literalness of recorded fact into a swirling, hallucinatory mass.
To create his paintings, Morley applies dyed fabric, wax, varnish, dense patches of colored thread, and, occasionally, oil paint to a range of supports that includes denim, glass, linen, and canvas. Sometimes he paints on glass, peels the image off, and affixes it to another support. The textures and varying opacities of these surfaces contribute to the work's material diversity; we get blocky quiltlike patterns, floral motifs, and faux-naif, cartoonish illustrations on tie-dyed grounds. Slipped into the mix are some Indonesian-style batiks, which Morley says he learned about from LA stoner culture."Lab 2001 ," the group of seven paintings in this exhibition, recreates an explosion that took place in the 1850s at a site identified on a wall panel as "Bill's Asphaltum-Camphene Lab." Bill, we learn, had luckily stepped out for a drink when the accident occurred. In depicting seven phases of the explosion, the paintings function like animation cels. They stand alone, but can also be experienced as a lightning-quick montage of jumpcuts. Through this approach, Morley avoids the dichotomy between abstract and figurative painting.Ivan Morley’s Tehachepi takes its title from the name of a small town near Fresno California, in which a ranch was recently purchased to be the site of a Norbertine convent; a true contemporary story, which in Morley’s hands harks back to the days of untamed savage territories yet to be conquest. Rendered over the lustrous sheen of aluminium sheeting, Morley’s abstract pattern is made from cloth and oil paint. Rendered with comic detail, each round form is given anthropomorphic effect. Idiosyncratic and naïve, his TexMex coloured swatches flock in huddled congregation, each an intrinsic, yet individual value of the whole.