The nervous plea in the title of Kristen Morgin’s New York solo debut seems warranted at first glance. This accumulation of meticulously crafted, painted-ceramic replicas of comics, toys, personal mail and more, laid out on rickety tables, looks like the world’s most precious yard sale. But behind a facade of understatement, Morgin cleverly challenges the ways in which we value things, making art that’s real and fake, handcrafted and reproduced, imitative and innovative, vintage and new, high and low, all at the same time.
Category-busting begins at the door with a shelf of roughly fashioned teacups featuring portraits of comics icons, from Wonder Woman to Snoopy, a cheeky mix of useful craft and pop-indebted fine art. Elsewhere, doodles on Post-its lie alongside a ceramic Curious George book, featuring the trouble-prone primate traveling through space. Despite its futuristic theme, the tome’s deliberately cracked and aged condition and added-on sketches—including a version of Picasso’s Guernica—summon a specter of ruin over predigital ephemera. Large drawings of a dodo bird and ticking clocks rendered over other ceramic facsimiles of comic books likewise reinforce the sense of imminent extinction, reminding us that the past is always mediated.
What would ordinarily be the show’s star attraction—a pale and crumpled replica of the Porsche Spyder in which James Dean met his end—is the Bamiyan Buddha of roadsters: a memory so wrecked that it’s barely related to the original. Morgin, however, isn’t after the trompe l’oeil virtuosity of Steve Wolfe or even Allen Ruppersberg’s reshuffled pop references. Instead, she gives us a pointed warning that everything starting out shiny and new inevitably crumbles to dust.
Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 791, November 25-December 1, 2010.