Morgan Stokes
CV
Current
Where The Body Ends,
R.M.Williams Residency, Sydney/Cadi, March-June 2025
Virgin, Oigåll Projects, Melbourne/Narrm, June 2025
2 Skeleton
3 Skin
4 Virtual Gaze
5 Concerning Existence
Where The Body Ends
R.M. Williams Residency
Sydney/Cadi, Australia
March-June 2025
The works in Where The Body Ends are formal studies in materiality, bridging the traditional components of painting – stretcher bars, cloth, and paint – with remnants of R.M.Williams’ legacy; discontinued lines of leather and suede salvaged from the company’s Adelaide factory. This fusion of artistic and artisanal materials interrogates notions of value and obsolescence, highlighting the liminal space between utility and aesthetics. The leather and suede, imbued with histories of labour and durability,
Stokes emphasises texture as a point of tension within this body of work. The leather’s rugged tactility confronts the ghostliness of silk, while paint acts as both mediator and disruptor. Each work embodies a negotiation of boundaries – between body and material, utility and ornament, permanence and decay. Through this series, Stokes reframes the relationship between material and maker, history and presence. Where The Body Ends is not only a study of material histories but also a poetic inquiry into the limits and possibilities of matter itself, asking how the textures of our lived experience are woven into the things we leave behind.
Pigment and acrylic on canvas, linen, hessian.
Acrylic and pigment on stitched linen, canvas, hessian.
R.M. Williams leather, silk organza, Australian Pine, pastel and stain, polyester organza, Australian Pine.
Acrylic and pigment on canvas, silk organza
R.M. Williams shoe, automative paint, exhaust pipe, leather string, mirrored acrylic base (detail)
R.M. Williams shoe, automative paint, exhaust pipe, leather string, mirrored acrylic base
R.M. Williams shoe, automative paint, exhaust pipe, leather string, mirrored acrylic base
Pigment and acrylic on canvas, silk organza.
Pigment and acrylic on canvas, linen, hessian.
Silk organza, polyester, R.M. Williams leather.
2024
Skeleton
Curatorial+Co.
Sydney/Cadi, Australia
October 2024
“We are now offered the illusion of modalities: namely, that
matter is incorporeal, weightless and exists optically like a mirage”
Clement Greenberg, 1967 (from Art & Objecthood by Michael Fried, Art Forum 1967)
Clement Greenberg, 1967 (from Art & Objecthood by Michael Fried, Art Forum 1967)
What significance can be found in the structure of something? A skeleton gives shape and coherence to a body. It symbolises the bare essence, the stripped-down truth and thus it also becomes a symbol for the pursuit of authenticity. A skeleton is also death and mortality, like the vanitas, it is a reminder of the transience of life; the temporal against the eternal. Just as the skeletal frame provides both constraint and possibility for movement in a living being, the underlying principles and frameworks in art both limit and liberate.
Following Stokes’ previous exhibition with Curatorial+Co., Skin, which examined the outermost layer, Skeleton flays the surface to examine within. Although the show hums with a naked, elemental current, tensions define the space: lightness vs darkness, lightness vs heaviness, fullness vs emptiness, creation vs destruction, object vs subject. Balance, tone, space and, pertinently, form: the elements of painting have been amputated from one another to be scrutinised in a material dimension. This emphasis on form further serves to underscore a certain physicality thus the show becomes a meditative exploration of not only the medium of painting and what lies beneath it’s surface, but also the visceral act of sharing space with matter. That is to say, Skeleton is an exploration of an unseen essentialness
Evident here is Stokes’ continuing preoccupation in how our mode of
perceptions change as the world becomes increasingly mediated by the
screen. The works embody a corporeality, they are studies in matter and
not images, and can be seen as formal exercises in reduction to
understand the vitality of form and material. Echoing a minimalist
aesthetic, the works become performers, they must be experienced in a
situation aware of a participant and consequently the beholder becomes
the subject. Stokes is not only investigating the objecthood of
painting, he seeks to imbue matter with a philosophical resonance in an
age of the immaterial.
Morgan Stokes’ artistic practice delves into the mediums of painting and sculpture, deconstructing them to their fundamental elements. Beginning with the traditional building blocks of each; pigment, cloth, stretcher bars, stone, he embarks upon a process of reinterpretation, interrogating the supposed value of each part and its role within the widely understood formula of what makes an artwork. Both literal and philosophical, Skeleton is a dialogue between body and material; a contemplation on what makes a painting in the digital age. Recalling the movements of Arte Povera, Mono-Ha and Material Realism and considered from a post-internet lens, Skeleton transcends the canvas, acting as a meditation on creation and art, the seen and the unseen.
Morgan Stokes’ artistic practice delves into the mediums of painting and sculpture, deconstructing them to their fundamental elements. Beginning with the traditional building blocks of each; pigment, cloth, stretcher bars, stone, he embarks upon a process of reinterpretation, interrogating the supposed value of each part and its role within the widely understood formula of what makes an artwork. Both literal and philosophical, Skeleton is a dialogue between body and material; a contemplation on what makes a painting in the digital age. Recalling the movements of Arte Povera, Mono-Ha and Material Realism and considered from a post-internet lens, Skeleton transcends the canvas, acting as a meditation on creation and art, the seen and the unseen.
2023
Skin
Curatorial+Co.
Sydney/Cadi, Australia
March-June 2025
A Glitch In Time
by Steph Wade
Such paintings, at that point in history, were not merely the product of inattentive doodling, but required considerable planning to obtain the materials needed to ground up a paste resembling paint—charcoal, clay, rocks, and animal fats and blood, sometimes collected from miles away—used to depict and engrave figurative paintings on the rough, textural walls of caves.
What themes or desires do these works represent? Archaeologists have many theories, but the fact is it is anyone’s guess. Perhaps part of it was about connecting with one’s physical surroundings; using our skin as a starting point to be in contact with the natural world.
Or maybe it was about creating for the sake of creation. Art then, it should be said, is a primordial act; the oldest and purest mode of creative expression that exists to render our situations and experiences into something tangible.
Material helps with this. In 1969, the legendary land artist Michael Heizer had an idea for a large-scale sculpture using an obscenely heavy rock, born from his time living in the arid Nevada desert. It took many decades to realise, and was a logistical nightmare, yet in 2012, a 150 million-year-old rock weighing a whopping 340 tonnes was transported from the desert to Los Angeles to form Levitated Mass (2012), a public art installation and cultural phenomenon.
Why are we so enthralled by a rock? The fascination with this piece of art becomes clearer when you consider that researchers are still scratching their heads over how the Great Pyramids of Giza were built some four thousand years ago. Heizer’s installation, like others of this calibre, has us yo-yoing with spiritual impulse from the present to the Middle Ages, and back to prehistoric times when the rock was formed. History, presence, and future coalesce.
***
Consider skin as a noun: the outer layer, or surface, of a body; the barrier between what is inside and outside, the ultimate emblem for embodiment. To touch the skin on your body and feel your presence in the world is to jolt yourself into the here and now.
Alberto Burri (1915–1995), a key innovator in the history of 20th-century art, pioneered a range of techniques to create his paintings and sculptures: layering, stitching, and sewing together sections of fabric, scratching, ripping, and burning holes, melting hard materials and cracking paint into patterns attributed to natural decay. This is Burri’s Material Realism: the representation of the formal, physical properties of materials, nothing more. Yet there is a tactile and visceral quality to his works that seems to emphasise the ageing process.
Now consider skin as a verb: to shed, or outgrow, one’s skin. A few key motifs emerge here in the inevitability of rebirth, renewal, and transformation. With this comes a metaphor in the reckoning of our current time: we know that the structural systems of the Global North—such as the enmeshment of technology with personhood and domination—can no longer hold or sustain us. They need to be shed in order for something new to emerge.
Or in other words, the creepy link between us and the virtual world has become so entangled that we don’t even know where we end and where technology begins. Time with friends becomes an opportunity to produce content; commutes are chances to increase productivity. Boredom ended in 2007. Everything physical has become indistinguishable from the internet, and there is seemingly little use for creation without a purpose.
The exhibition ‘Skin’ was conceived to explore these ideas. It is a framework to understanding painting as a metaphor for personhood, and surface as a metaphor for skin. Morgan Stokes is drawn to subject matter that is anchored in everyday life but has a metaphysical interpretation. In his previous exhibition ‘Virtual Gaze’, the artist questioned the dissonance between experiencing art online versus in real life. Yet where he ruminated on the virtual world through painting and sculpture, with this new body of work, Stokes meditates on existence in, and perception of, the physical world around us.
Inspired by techniques and forms seen in Alberto Burri’s Material Realism, art movements like the Korean Dansaekhwa and Post-Minimalism, and the suspended sculptures of Jose Dávila, the works in ‘Skin’ are reduced in order to emphasise their materiality. Surfaces of the canvases form a type of skin, constructed through repetitive actions that create highly textured surfaces.
In a way, his paintings explore the dynamic traits of skin—its vulnerabilities to space and time and its unique irregularities. In some works, traditional painting materials such as linen and canvas are torn up and reconstructed; perhaps questioning what makes a painting in the digital age. Silk, metal and clothing stand in for canvas in others, our eyes question the surface. Elsewhere, the fabric stretches or expands depending on the level of humidity; the painting breathes and changes, it is not a static image.
Rocks are used in both paintings and sculptures, their raw mass and prehistory palpable, standing in contrast to the modern mass-manufactured linens and fabrics surrounding them. This contrast is what compels the show; somehow, a primal sensibility runs through the works—almost as if you’re in a cave, rather than a gallery. Indeed, the artist examined cave paintings for inspiration materially, texturally, and compositionally. Looking to the past, from the lens of the future, as a means to make sense of the physical world.
Over many thousands of years, the surfaces where art materialises have changed; each was fitting depending on the specific point in time. Caves, temples, tombs, rock walls, palaces, churches, buildings, gallery walls—and now, screens. As technology strangles our every waking moment, maybe staring at primary matter is satisfying because it hits some primal nerve; a reminder that we continue to be severed from nature. A back-to-front world.
Amidst our digital dystopia, ‘Skin’ recalls the origins of art, the nature of creation, and the role of material in an increasingly material-free culture. It is a reminder of what came before us and what will remain after we’re gone. History, presence, and future coalesce. The intention? To see our own skin.
2022
Virtual Gaze
Curatorial+Co.
Sydney/Cadi, Australia
March 2022
- Walter Benjamin
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)
As the pandemic unfolded, our world view inadvertently shifted from the physical to the virtual. Our loved ones and colleagues were rendered to the maximum degree of pixel density our devices could handle; we became our front-cameras. The tradition of illusion in art shifted into our palms and we were now the illusion; every online image a masterpiece of trompe l’oeil.
Of course, well before the pandemic, we willingly became devoted subjects of surveillance capitalism, embracing a marked escalation in technological addiction framed by a backdrop of environmental and economic catastrophe. The subsequent governmentally and socially enforced separation only served to underscore our late-capitalist mentalities: we are alone, but technology can save us. Accepting the pandemic as our final, complete baptismal immersion into hyperreality (in case there were any specks of reality still lingering), one recalls the French philosopher Guy Debord’s pithy 1967 Society of the Spectacle portending, “the spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.”
Surveillance capitalism, to underscore, is an economic system focused on the commodification of personal data with the express purpose of generating profit. Baudrillard defines hyperreality as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreality”. Reality is no longer discernible as we live in our blessed, optimised, panopticon lives. We’ve exchanged our natural personhood to become branded commodities emancipated from the shackles of history, free to curate our personal newsfeeds with maximum algorithmic effect. At the same time, we are ironically shackled indelibly to our own personal histories as every moment is recorded with or without our consent. Time and space, the two constants, are no longer that constant.
Virtual Gaze has been created with these ideas in mind. The screen is the muse: both its contents and its surface. Each work ruminates on the virtual world through the mediums of painting and sculpture. The works are formal studies into material properties of what comprises a painting or sculpture (for example paint, canvas or
stretcher bars) underscoring them as physical objects and therefore exploring their verisimilitude, their reality versus virtuality. They are not images to scroll past, they are paintings. The sparseness of the works disrupt a traditional reading of art - and digital images - where subtly of texture and materiality become vehicles for meaning. Narrative can be interpreted through material, through perception and light, through the sharing of a unique space and time between human and work.
The French painter Charles Lapicque said that the creative act should offer as much surprise as life itself. Silk obscures and enhances, offering a tech-esque shimmer and obfuscation. Heavily worked metal sits alongside natural linen beside raw rock, an orgy of cavelike primitivism and sophisticated mechanically-produced synthetic material. The imperfect stitch and the few visible marks become focal points and exist almost as accidents: their existence linger as human question marks, as ontological smudges.
Artworks are sometimes arranged as a screen may be, constructed from arranged pixels. The composition for the work, ‘Situating our dreams’, was taken from a composition algorithm generator commissioned for and made by a coder in Ukraine. ‘#FFF3D3’ is a combination of studies translating a digital colour (the hex value of the title) into panels using a variety of media and surfaces, interpreting the colour at different times of the day and in different lights. ‘A primal condition’ was created through seeping colour through the reverse of the canvas, using the texture of the paint and material to dictate appearance. Metal works evoke the industrial nature of the screen, but at the same time contradict this perfection through their organic, vulnerable makeup.
Ironically the JPGs of ‘Virtual gaze’ will become the end product in the lifecycle of the works and will be the way the works will be largely viewed and remembered, reproduced any number of times. The philosopher Walter Benjamin said that technology drove a shift from art as something of contemplation to that of distraction because of its reproducibility. Technology directly impacts sense and perception, two factors which ultimately affect “humanity’s entire mode of existence”. In a world where we are the product, where we are endlessly reproduced in the hyperreal, you might wonder what Benjamin would say about humanity’s current mode of existence.
The French painter Charles Lapicque said that the creative act should offer as much surprise as life itself. Silk obscures and enhances, offering a tech-esque shimmer and obfuscation. Heavily worked metal sits alongside natural linen beside raw rock, an orgy of cavelike primitivism and sophisticated mechanically-produced synthetic material. The imperfect stitch and the few visible marks become focal points and exist almost as accidents: their existence linger as human question marks, as ontological smudges.
Artworks are sometimes arranged as a screen may be, constructed from arranged pixels. The composition for the work, ‘Situating our dreams’, was taken from a composition algorithm generator commissioned for and made by a coder in Ukraine. ‘#FFF3D3’ is a combination of studies translating a digital colour (the hex value of the title) into panels using a variety of media and surfaces, interpreting the colour at different times of the day and in different lights. ‘A primal condition’ was created through seeping colour through the reverse of the canvas, using the texture of the paint and material to dictate appearance. Metal works evoke the industrial nature of the screen, but at the same time contradict this perfection through their organic, vulnerable makeup.
Ironically the JPGs of ‘Virtual gaze’ will become the end product in the lifecycle of the works and will be the way the works will be largely viewed and remembered, reproduced any number of times. The philosopher Walter Benjamin said that technology drove a shift from art as something of contemplation to that of distraction because of its reproducibility. Technology directly impacts sense and perception, two factors which ultimately affect “humanity’s entire mode of existence”. In a world where we are the product, where we are endlessly reproduced in the hyperreal, you might wonder what Benjamin would say about humanity’s current mode of existence.
2021
Concerning Existence
Curatorial+Co.
Sydney/Cadi, Australia
May-June 2021
Despite their appearance, Stokes’ works are a rumination on the virtual world, each a response to our escalating entrapment within our screens. Approaching works from a post-internet school of thought with a post-minimalist sensibility, Stokes’ works seek to explore the physicality of painting as well as the way we perceive image itself.
Each piece is an enquiry into the medium of painting, exploring and exploiting the material properties of paint, canvas and timber. Yet at the same time they are explorations developed through the lens of the screen and, as such, are self-referential products of Adobe tools: cut & paste, the eyedropper to pick colours, the brush to create marks, the gradient function.
Eschewing a manicured, well-rendered illusion in favour of sparse canvases with few, self-conscious strokes, a cynical thread runs through his pieces. They are aware of themselves as paintings and as eventual JPGs; they waver between something to look at and something to scroll past. Existing as interstices, the pace of the works lie in direct contrast to the speed of online, requiring an observational discipline.
Each painting is a formal study in colour and material, overlaid with marks which appear both accidental yet mechanical, intuitive yet intentional. They strive to be honest and abject yet covertly exist otherwise: marks made by a robot vacuum echo human marks; synthetic iridescent vinyl sits atop raw canvas; contrived organic colours live beside the real thing. Stepping back, the overall effect ranges from introspective and melancholic to sardonic.
Ironically the JPGs, which will become the end product in the lifecycle of the works, will be the way the works will be largely viewed and remembered. Any nuance or corporeality will be abolished when shifted online, completing the full circle from digital conception to painterly work back to virtuality.
Ironically the JPGs, which will become the end product in the lifecycle of the works, will be the way the works will be largely viewed and remembered. Any nuance or corporeality will be abolished when shifted online, completing the full circle from digital conception to painterly work back to virtuality.