The Puritans – if only for a lack of a better term – were a little too puritanical for me. Here’s good old John Winthrop from 1630:
    “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us,” he says.
    I say that’s a lot of pressure, friend. According to Winthrop not only do we have to live respectably for ourselves, we also have to accept that everyone is watching. Now I’m not exactly sure as to how Winthrop conceived of his society’s ideals, a butter churn for every household maybe, but what if they were to materialize into nothing more than a pile of porn, cigarettes, laundry detergent, burgers, and lawn furniture?
    How about a sketchy, jagged mass of browbeaten soldiers?
    Or a vague Emerald City sort of place?
    The Capitol?
    Aaron Morse, in his third exhibition at Acme Gallery, offers up all of these as responses or possible answers to the question of what happened to the City on a Hill, which so cleverly is also the title of his show. What happens to ideals when they become corrupted, tied to consumption and institution?
    Boxing matches, political figures, and even the fossil record and Coachella are not free from corruption; rather, they are painted in somewhat lurid colors, painstakingly worked on, and deliberate in their address. Morse’s works are diverse in how they look but all seem to share these themes, making for a cohesive yet exciting showing.
    In some works he shares the idiom of Jasper Johns, taking up preexisting subject matter and reworking it, not without humor: his flag is etched into, scratched on, painted, collaged, and painted over. Famous politicians stand beneath an eerie purple sky filled with smaller scenes while the American Bald Eagle turns into a monstrous mechanomorph.
    I picture Morse kind of as his own depiction of Jonah: waiting to be released from the belly of the beast but quietly stoking a small fire in the meantime.

review by Sara Kahlenberg