Projects — Dara Morgenstern

Architectural Intervention (The End)

2023

Project Text

The wall was built between the columns as a place to hang pictures. The columns there a hundred years before the gallery, the foundation of a building advertised by its developer as the longest building in the city; overlooking the water, before the bay was filled. I pictured, and then painted a picture of the wall. Displaced somewhere that looks the way cinema and television trained me to imagine the end of the world. The wall and the columns will remain there after my picture is removed. They will likely remain for a while after, too. But I wonder, how much longer? Will the gallery be there after the sea rises and the bay returns? What happens to pictures after the end of the world?

Architectural Intervention (The End). 2023. Installation view, MassArt × SoWa Gallery, Boston, MA. Photo: Rebecca Morrison.

Architectural Intervention (The End). 2023. Oil on canvas. 60 × 78 inches.

Scenes

2021–2022

Project Text

Consider the idea of a painting of a place. It is not of a specific place or any one particular painting. It is a meta-text of place painting encompassing the ruins of the Modern and the Postmodern, one that has long since swallowed whole cinema’s mise-en-scéne and bathed itself in Los Angeles sunshine. Now please consider the possibility of a painting of that idea — paintings of the idea of paintings of places. Paintings of the way two-dimensional pictorial space might be organized with the logic of a three-dimensional scene. That is what these paintings are. They hide no secrets of the story of their making, they are diagrams of their own construction, self-consciously the behind-the-scenes featurette moreso than the actual film. Each is a fragment, a scene of a single site construction in a vast imaginary somewhere that is also nowhere. Together they form an attempt to reconstitute one possible permutation of this expansive idea of place painting, bounded by my own limited frame of reference.

Ext. Void – Dusk. 2021. Oil on canvas. 20 × 16 inches.
Ext. Columns – Dawn. 2021. Oil on canvas. 16 × 20 inches.
Ext. Facade – Day. 2021. Oil on linen. 16 × 20 inches.
Ext. Form and Void-form – Day. 2021. Oil on linen. 20 × 16 inches.
Ext. Void-form – Day. 2022. Oil on canvas. 18 × 24 inches.
Ext. Column – Day. 2022. Oil on canvas. 36 × 24 inches.
Ext. Columns – Day. 2022. Oil on canvas. 18 × 24 inches.
Ext. Void-shape – Day. 2022. Oil on linen. 10 × 8 inches.
Ext. Pyramid – Dusk (1). 2022. Oil on canvas. 20 × 16 inches.
Ext. Pyramid – Dusk (2). 2022. Oil on canvas. 20 × 16 inches.
Ext. Facade – Dusk. 2022. Oil on canvas. 30 × 40 inches.

Scenes. 2022. Installation view, North Cracketorium, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA. 2022.

Scenes (1). 2021. Hard-ground etching with dyrpoint, sugar lift aquatint, and chine collé on Rives BFK. 6 × 4.5 inches on 15 × 12 inch sheet.

Scenes (2). 2021. Hard-ground etching with dyrpoint, sugar lift aquatint, and chine collé on Rives BFK. 4.5 × 6 inches on 15 × 12 inch sheet.

Scenes (3). 2021. Hard-ground etching with dyrpoint, spit bite aquatint, and chine collé on Rives BFK. 6 × 4.5 inches on 15 × 12 inch sheet.

Scenes. Portfolio of three etchings with aquatint and chine collé.

Ext. Structure – Dusk. 2021. Drypoint with watercolor monotype on Rives de Lin. 8 × 12 inches on 18 × 14 inch sheet.