Elizabeth Johnson: Tess Wei’s catalog essay for your 2021 exhibition, Bell the Cat (VSOP Projects, Greenport, NY) aligned your work with two terms “proximate - near but not quite there” and “approximate - within range but not equivalent. What words come to mind as you prepare for your upcoming Gross McCleaf exhibit of painting, relief, and sculpture?

Morgan Hobbs: I would add analog, as a noun, “a comparable thing,” and as an adjective, “a mechanism or device in which information is represented by continuously variable physical quantities,” and “not digital, not computerized,” as Merriam-Webster puts it.

The word is relevant as I move between painting, sculpture, and low relief while utilizing a small set of images, shapes, and/or symbols. I’m interested in depicting a single motif in several painted and sculpted ways and in various settings.

Some paintings are split down the middle with two different approaches to the same image. On one side, there is color, light, and shadow. On the other are black and white squares or spots to create the same form on a grid, as if it’s a pixelated image or made of tiles. To me, one becomes the “analog” version of the other.

MH: Philadelphia has loads of history, myth, and legend in its buildings. I studied anthropology and archeology as a minor in undergrad, and though I don’t have a background in architectural history, I began noticing the carved details––columns, portraits of Benjamin Franklin, angels, crosses––mixed among the structural bricks of the buildings I passed each morning on my way to work.

The details have decorative purposes and symbolic meaning. Columns are reminders of Western culture’s beginnings in antiquity. Benjamin Franklin is essentially Philadelphia’s mascot. Angels and crosses are Christian motifs. And then by creating those shapes in my studio, out of newspaper, I began to see them as stand-ins for ideas, as fragments disconnected from the structures that support them, and this opened many metaphors and narratives.

I stack them in groupings and columns, making them appear somewhat structured, but not necessarily in their intended position. Large blocks are on the top; decorative pieces and sculptural fragments might appear in the middle or at the bottom or along the foot of the stack. I like when they feel like haphazard ruins, unbalanced but somehow still standing. As a painter, I do find it easier to work with rectangular blocks, which are basically six-sided paintings.

MH: As for referencing a specific religion, I can speak only to what I know and understand. My parents are devout Evangelicals living in the Midwest. They homeschooled me with a religious curriculum until I started high school part-time in 9th grade. We attended a Pentecostal church and then later a non-denominational/Baptist church. I was taught a particular kind of Christian philosophy and a Conservative worldview.

Now I see how that belief system has affected Western culture and centuries of international affairs. It’s fascinating how childhood Bible stories are still relevant to my art history knowledge. Many amazing Western art historical works were commissioned by the church. I got to see a lot of them when I visited Rome and the Vatican in August.

Throughout history, religion has been used as an excuse for colonialism, racism, and other brutalities. I don’t practice any kind of religion, but I do feel a responsibility to pay attention to how “Christian values” infiltrate politics. I’m not a scholar on these subjects, I’m just an artist, but my perspective is unique because of my upbringing and my art and anthropology education. My work seeks to find throughlines from the ancient past to present to future. I want to know how things change through time and how they stay the same.

MH: I won’t make them out of stone, but I am beginning to make them out of melted Type 2 HDPE recycled plastic.

Wei's statement about anticipating, retrieving, and making meaning is still important to me. I like when my work contains a few curious elements that taken together create multiple inferences or interpretations. When I translate one of my symbols into a tiled pattern, it could be interpreted as saying the same thing twice, but the image version and the tiled version are never identical. Returning to Circumpoint, the top and bottom are the same general idea but could be understood differently based on the way they are painted.

The mosaic-style painting is useful in several ways. First, I like the simplicity of using just black and white on a grid. Some of the black and white grids look like tiles and others look digital, like a pixelated image made of 1’s and 0’s. Second, they often become a bridge between 2D and 3D. It seems like each mosaic painting gets thicker and thicker painted tiles. Some of the painting’s tiles are so thick that they almost look like buttons. In that space, yes, the facsimile gets a little blurry.

MH: No, I produced my own. If I had copied, it may have changed how I use the idea of mosaics. Most Roman mosaics I’ve seen aren’t set on a grid, but when I put them on a grid, its structure opens possible associations: pixelation, and forms of abstract painting.

I’m reading Genevieve von Petzinger’s research on Ice Age symbols. She found 32 geometric symbols that were frequently used in cave paintings over 30,000 years. It’s incredible to imagine what they may have meant and if that meaning changed. Thirty thousand years is a long time.

Cuneiform began only 5500 years ago. It’s the earliest known form of writing; in part, due to the incidental preservation of clay tablets which served as a substrate for the marks. Cuneiform is also a very cool example of pictographs (a form of proto-writing with small drawn icons) that developed into writing. As I understand it, the departure from the icons to writing happened sort of like the game Pictionary. The drawings spoken together created unrelated words. Like a bumble bee standing in for the word be. Another amazing fact is that cuneiform was used as the written language for several different spoken languages.

MH: ...I also wanted the icons around the outside edge to be more pictorial than the cross and “x” shapes in the dark rectangle. In some works, the icons come to represent specific ideas or simply pictures of what they are. I like that the hatch mark at the center top left is a tic-tac-toe board, a pound key, and a hashtag. To me, the bottom center right rectangular shape looks like a calculator. I like the imperfection of the hand-drawn squares. Some of my mosaic drawings are less perfect than others; I like them both ways: it all depends on what the drawing needs.  I probably wouldn’t ever work on graph paper or something with a machine-made grid. I’m more interested in referencing something machine-made than using it.

EJ: Symbol Drawings 2 seems to explore the transformation of a fountain image as drawing, mosaic, and sculptural form. To you, does making the image feel more flat and less representational (and thus more iconic) imbue the piece with loss, the compression of time, or magic? I sense that painting or sculpting presumed shards of architecture, writing and symbols suggests that collective human endeavor changes but is never entirely lost, yet rather, ripening for reuse. Spolia supports this feeling by using painted mosaic tiles or bricks to create a hallowed zone that is watched over by a sculpture-fragment eye. How does this piece function for you?

MH: Water is critical to our existence. As far as we know, life itself isn’t possible without water. Painting water provides many more formal options for my paintings. It’s a nice counterbalance to the bricks and tiles because water is somewhat formless: it takes the form of its container and its motion. To me, the water in the fountains refers to the infinite, the all-knowing, the soul. It reflects the sky above, which in most of the paintings takes the form of a sun with colored rings creating something like a portal or an eye.

Sometimes the fountains look like alien and human figures. Fountains express the broader concerns of my practice. Drill down into a single idea: you release a vast reservoir of possibilities. But will fountains move me closer to something “specific”? Probably not. I enjoy what comes from a game of suggestions, analogies, and approximations.

––Elizabeth Johnson (elizabethjohnsonart.com)
edited by Matthew Crain (@sarcastapics)
December 2023