Sean Morello: Constellations & Supersymmetries

Sean Morello’s Constellations & Supersymmetries feature a series of collages that emerge from his practice as a painter who is consciously engaged with art history. Using discarded and found materials, Morello’s works first suggest color, form, and mark-making before signifying notions of garbage as anthropological ephemera of a consumer society.

As abstractions, the pieces link to design and form, flatness and depth, figure and ground; as collages they engage with object and construction; as color they are paintings. Morello’s abstraction of text-based, mass-produced material forces Pop art—commercial printmaking, fashion and textile design—into the language of Color Field and Abstract Expressionist painting.

In the Constellations grouping, Morello’s collages are photographic snapshots of discarded materials. Notably, Morello’s compositions are made of materials collected together from the same place and at the same time, resulting in visual documentations of a specific moment that are then abstracted and distanced from their original locale. The order imposed by viewer/artist is an imposition over a random collection, much like the connection of stars to create compositional harmony in a constellation.

The Supersymmetries grouping takes its name from a physical theory supplementary to the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which emerged from the discovery of subatomic particles in the 1960s. This theory attempts to apply an additional theoretical structural framework to help explain externalities to the Standard Model, such as the existence of dark matter. Morello adapts this title and theory to describe the way his symmetrical and art historical compositions impose a metaphysical order on the chaos that is capitalism, mass consumption, and waste.

*Curated by CUAC Contemporary