Press Release from Gross McCleaf Gallery, Nov 2023

“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.”

- Morgan Hobbs

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Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present Chronolith, Morgan Hobbs’ first solo exhibition in Philadelphia and with the gallery.     

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Guest writer Lauren Whearty says: “Hobbs’ body of work focuses on the slow and methodical process of building a language - a new form of communication through paint, papier-mâché, and image. Each symbolic form is a building block for a wide array of possibilities with the potential to make new meaning through different combinations, or to break down the strength of an individual symbol into a more democratic piece of a larger whole.

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While I recognized many of the symbols from her previous bodies of work, like the interiors in her Bell the Cat series, the forms now exist on their own free to roam the studio and assert themselves as sculptures and whole compositions in dimensional paintings. The forms are still understood as ornamental symbols, however, the mass of the sculptures and the dimensional qualities in the paintings give a more architectural feeling and weight to each glyph. The duality of the actual weight vs the perceptual weight is just one of the many elements of tension presented in this work. The works also perform a balancing act between painting and sculpture, and between the single vs the many.

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Hobbs doesn’t give us the opportunity to fully grasp these works in any one sitting. Like investigating a lost civilization, we cannot ask the people questions, and Hobbs doesn’t give us all of the answers. We are given a rich body of material and symbolic language to navigate and interpret on our own. As the viewer, we are also the ones who complete the meaning through our own relationships with the symbols and our experience with the art. In art, life, and archeology we are limited to our own perspectives and time periods. Hobbs makes that a point of excitement,” (Whearty’s statements have been lightly edited for style and length).