Knockdown Center is pleased to present “27 Undoctored Photos of Betsy DeVos’ Radioactive Gingerbread Learnin’ Supercenter That Prove Camera Angle Is Everything. You Might Also Like: Transforming That Pesky White Guilt Into The Perfect Paleo Deviled Eggs, If You’re Into That Kind of Thing (Extruded Detail),” a new large-scale work by artist Morgan Blair as a part of our FiftyTwo Ft. series of long-term wall-based artworks in the East Corridor.

Blair’s painting process begins online, where she collects and collages together stills from children’s claymation projects on Youtube. Seeking crudely assembled approximations of reality, she further manipulates this visual material towards and away from abstraction, making new iterations from morphed and flattened blobs of colored clay. Ultimately these compositions are transferred onto wall and canvas where the shapes are filled with hard-edged airbrushed gradients and three-dimensional texture that further obscure the subject matter. Clashing, saturated colors root the paintings in an alternate reality while rambling, stream-of-consciousness titles combine personal, political, and pop culture references suggest new contexts for the final images.

Morgan Blair is an artist based in Ridgewood, Queens. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. She has shown her work at The Hole (New York), Paul Kasmin Gallery (New York), Shane Campbell Gallery (Chicago), Andrew Rafacz (Chicago), Left Field (San Luis Obispo), Eighteen (Copenhagen), and the Newcomb Art Museum (New Orleans) and others. Blair has also painted large-scale murals at venues such as the Facebook offices in New York, Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Ma, Swanson Road Intermediate School in Auburn, MA, and Rudy’s Barbershop in Los Angeles. She also started Puzzle Time, an ongoing series of limited edition, hand-cut wooden jigsaw puzzles featuring the work of select contemporary artists.