Aaron Morse at La Loma Projects

At La Loma Projects, an exhibition of paintings titled Mineral Mythology by Aaron Morse pushes those titular words to their limits. Each painting is a dense soup of strata, flora, fauna, mythology, and archeology, pulling from everything and everything, as if to suggest an intentional compression of time and space. In Wilderness (all works 2021), the composition is made of small vignettes, each pulling towards a different time period, place, and locale. A woman in the foreground wears a ‘70s-style dress, while in the background a more paleolithic figure romps through the wilderness. Tigers lounge next to geckos and black bears in shifting scales that belie any notion of actual scale. 

Cloud World (Mazeppa) pulls more directly from a specific source: the narrative evoked in a poem by Lord Byron of a young Mazeppa who is strapped naked to a horse after his love affair with a Countess is discovered by the Count. Other works, like The Sea, seem to zoom out on culture, nature, and the world at large, like some kind of ouroboros of evolution that celebrate the diversity of life and the wildness it contains.  

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Photo: Aaron Morse, Cloud World (Mazeppa) (detail) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and La Loma Projects.