Press Release

TRY GOD

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery is pleased to present TRY GOD an exhibition by young New York artist Sarah Morris.

In a society numbed by the fictional excesses of its realities Sarah Morris offers deadly casual reflection. Cold execution, bald enunciation and industrial psychology conspire in her work to create an uneasy conflation of banality and evil. Sarah Morris’s drawings, large hardware store signs and silkscreen paintings of serial killers bespeak the reductive language and imagery of a dysfunctional America. Calling to mind endless tract housing and weirdly mundane suburban scenarios gone dreadfully wrong she maps a peculiar strand of the American psyche.

Her minimal outline drawings are echoes of the newspaper clippings they derive from. By bleeding the tories of their sensational juices she offers detached depictions of murderous misadventure. Large silkscreened paintings reproduce hot-off-the-presses clippings of spree killers, swat teams and in one instance, cops outside the house of a murdered family. Her explode gasoline containers are pop objects gone awry which evoke the nihilism of the suburban arsonist. Large spin paintings, PRIVATE PROPERTY, BEWARE OF THE DOG, KEEP OUT, NO TRESPASSING, JESUS KNOWS, ambiguously attest to the inviolable American right to bear arms, protect property, guard religious beliefs and sustain freedom at all cost. One senses that guy-next-door types lurk behind these imperatives: average, anonymous citizens hovering at the cusp of sanity, just about to snap.

Sarah Morris has participated in a number of group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe and has had two solo shows: “Citizens” Kunsthall, New York, 1992 and Close-Up, 233 West 42nd Street, New York, October 1993.