Artist statements
Morgan Buck (b. 1985) is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. His photorealistic airbrush paintings are often mysterious, funny, and ominous. Buck’s work uses the vast weirdness of the internet to generate it’s content. Randomly searching the web with a theme in mind, Buck goes down deep rabbit holes accumulating ideas and images. Manipulating the found images with digital and optical methods, he alters the read of the image to create narrative that connects to larger ideas as well as compositional situations with formal appeal. These images become the source material for his paintings. He uses a photorealistic airbrush technique and the context of painting as a way to counteract the often dismissed ephemeral nature of digital media and give the work the instant credibility that only skilled painting seems to have.
Artist Statement
To create from my brain, I know what seemingly clever things my imagination will do. The most exciting thing that a painting can do is to give a “you can’t make this shit up” type of vibe. This vibe has a tendency to present itself in reality tv, weird internet trash and social media as passing glimpses into a stranger world. These media sources become the raw source material for my paintings. Aggregating, combining, and altering screenshots from many web media sources; google, netflix, instagram, etc. I source imagery and text that inspires me, turns me on, makes me laugh or even cringe to make connections and formal situations that are far more exciting than what I could imagine.
My soft focus photorealist airbrush technique dematerialises the brushstroke, so the painting looks less like a painting and more like a digital print. This process also keeps intact the commonly perceived values that painting has over printed digital media. These values include, but are not limited to: pigment quality, the acceptance and respect that painting is given in art, the rarefied object, the reverence of labor, etc. Combining this perceived glory of painting with this internet trash “easy grab” content, a contemporary solution to the historical baggage of painting is provided and the transubstantiation of appropriated imagery occurs.
With the recent inclusion of text in the work, I will always pull a screenshot of a closed caption from a movie, documentary, reality tv type of thing. I put an appropriated caption on the image and the juxtaposition gives just enough info to make it funny, mysterious, or smart. My work is part of the genre of art that is a critique of creating from imagination and romanticizing the artist's hand. For my work to feel new and fresh for me, the act of expressing ideas through the transformation of appropriated content has been the most fruitful.
-Morgan Buck
Artist Statement 2016
The Crumple Paintings are sculptural paintings that fold the support into the process of creating a painted image. I began this body of work in his first semester of my MFA in Craft in 2013 trying to find an alien way of painting relating to some rearranged art historical timeline. Although I later learned of others who explore a similar form of painting, this work stands out in its dynamic integration of applications of paint, surfaces, compositions and attention to the frame. Through the repeated process of crumpling the wire mesh support that the linen is sewn onto, the picture plane fragments in unexpected ways. What would be considered conventional abstract painting devices become activated in an unusual way on the crumple canvas. The surface dynamically undulates with a variety of different folds and paint applications structured based it's crumpled existence, released folds from earlier in the process, or imposed painted compositional elements. This can give the paintings a feeling like they're exploding out of another dimension. For me it's about the wonder of creating a painting experience where the surface, shape, support and image can evolve radically as work reacts to itself
~Morgan Buck
Child PM
Child PM is a Kaufmanesque performance comedy rock group that's a creative collaboration between Morgan Buck and Justin Stimson. They play two distinct self-absorbed characters whose outrageous dichotomy of personality and backstory drive their music and impromptu comedic antics. According to their backstory, these two characters that they play, Carl Crisp (Morgan Buck) and Crispin McCarls Jr. (Justin Stimson), start a band with the intent to be more famous and influential than the Beatles find that they were married and divorced from the same woman. After bonding over their newfound divorcee comradely, they find that they both miss their role as a step dad. Thus, they commit to gain full custody of their ex-wives children from a previous marriage: aka their ex- step kids.
The divorce also had psychological and financial impacts on the characters as well. Carl Crisp became a narcissistic, sellout, poseur Rockstar hell-bent on money, power, and being worshiped as a musical genius who answers to no one (think Donald Trump meets Liam Gallagher meets Motivational speaker). While on the other hand Crispin McCarls Jr. became an unhinged homeless drunk who has to balance his love for his step kids and living in the woods with his love for liquor and disorderly conduct. The two of them both have a delusion that they are immortal and created god as a robot before the beginning of time, on the Perfection Plane of Existence (a dimension where things like truly straight lines and true right angles are not just mathematical abstractions, but are possible in nature), within the institution of the Perfection Brotherhood. After creating the universe, with the soul intent to give Child PM a place to record, the god robot wanted to participate in all the fun and therefore became a sadistic clown who makes appearances in Child PM recordings.
Child PM has been active on and off since 2009, and is currently recording on their second album, Step Dads in Harmony.