JENNY MORGAN
Turning the Tide

To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by ‘the self’. – Carl Jung

Beers is thrilled to present Turning the Tide, the first UK solo exhibition by American artist Jenny Morgan. For this body of work, Morgan invites viewers to journey with her to the proverbial dark side of the moon…and back. And not unlike like Pink Floyd’s psychedelic journey through psychological states, Morgan’s body of work similarly references lunar patterns. Just as the moon controls the tides, each of the 11 paintings included here concerns itself with the duality of the human psyche.

Throughout, works with saturated colour spectrums are paired with muted grey tones, a contrast that Morgan believes exists as a visual metaphor for polarities of human consciousness. Yet, despite how liberal her manipulation of colour appears, her chosen palette is strikingly limited; for Morgan, such restraint allows for a deeper understanding of the individual depicted combined with a fuller exploration into (the layers of) the subject matter.

Those who follow Morgan’s work will recognize a host of familiar faces, even cheekily alluded to with ‘David’s Return’ and her most recognisable subject in ‘Crescent’. Her recurrent usage of loved ones (and her own self-portrait) as her subject matter provides her the opportunity to intimately investigate her own relationships with these individuals and with herself. For the viewer, however, the relationship with the subject in each painting acts almost like a mirror – these are paintings that are confident and pained, direct yet mysterious. However it is a long-accepted notion most-famously worded by Oscar Willde that suggests the portrait painter’s work seems to just say as much – or more – about the painter and her own processes than the sitter. But they ask us to consider ourselves, as well. They address us – each looking into our eyes as we gaze into theirs. Perhaps through Morgan’s work, we become aware of how notions of ‘the self’ exist as a paradox of opposites: light and dark, good and evil, confident and vulnerable… allegories relating to highs and lows of the tides, lunar eclipses, day and night. For Morgan, this notion of ‘turning the tide’ refers to “the act of reversing the direction of energy and thought by transforming the darkness to light, and inversely, turning lightness to dark and revealing the psychological shadow.”

For viewers, the resulting works come across as stark, unnerving, and dramatic. Most of these portraits engage directly with the viewer, but seem somehow guarded, or removed, as though simultaneously inviting – and warning – of this psychological journey. Are these women – often appearing unforgivingly nude – confident and defiant, or are they wounded and reticent? Certainly ‘Shapeshifter’ inhabits this duality: both seductive and guarded. ‘Never Going Back’ is suggestively titled as well, perhaps in reference to domestic abuse or female emancipation, or one might assume, both.

Two of the portraits operate on an inverted colour-scheme; challenging the viewer with an uncanny image of the portrait, somehow both digital and post-digital, these works reach out to a generation of hyperractive visual stimuli by offering both an answer and a new question. Asking us to trade places, if only for a moment, to venture into the obscurity of the subconscious…where only there we might find light.