Margaret Morgan
Laocoön

May 9 - June 21, 2025

In the winter of 2024 Morgan exhibited at Not There Galleryery her work with found twigs and found language. The exhibition was called Please Try Again. On the wall, made of twigs combined, were words and phrases taken from the various WIFI networks that appeared in her cell phone as she drove around her neighborhood. Morgan then fashioned the twigs into letters and words. The sticks she found on the ground started as natural objects and ended up as symbolic language, but the language itself was also found, floating in the digital air and attaching to nature in unconvincing harmony. This installation, made specifically for the proxy Gallery, spells “Laocoön” with twigs. The letters are three- dimensional, different sizes and dispersed in the space of the Gallery. The twigs are glued together to form letters, and the letters hover in the air supported by visible strings. In relation to the text the Proxy gallery appears small or large depending on whether we see the gallery as a relation of size or of scale. This is significant because the twig fragments are their natural size, while language as such has no given size, color or font. Outside of conventionalized typography, black ink on white paper, this different kind of writing inevitably calls attention to its form.

Leaving behind the digital WIFI codes, this works leaps far back into ancient myth and art history. Laocoön is a very different kind of code-on the one hand a figure from (pre-Christian) Greek mythology, and on the other a famous ancient sculpture in the Vatican Museum. The Laocoön sculpture, depicting Laocoön and his sons struggling with sea serpents, was created in the 1st century BCE. Laocoön, a priest of Apollo, was the one who unsuccessfully warned the Trojans against accepting the Trojan Horse by saying the famous (per Virgil’s Aeneid) “Beware the Greeks bearing gifts.” The installation and the characters here appear not only as iconic signs, but also as symbols and indexes (in English:) a sculpture of a word, suggesting an image and a story. Laocoön is brought up to date as a prophet who is punished for his correct prophecy.

I can’t help but see this stick word as a reflecting the present historical moment. Beware the loss that appears as a privilege.
-- Annetta Kapon for Proxy Gallery

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