Kristen Morgin at Marc Selwyn

Kristen Morgin creates ruins. The paradox inherent in that enterprise is compounded by her choice of materials and subjects. Each of the four pieces in her first solo show refers to something once common, now obsolete or nearly so: an old model Fiat, a child's pedal car and carousel animals. Morgin constructs each object true to scale but fragmented, with a skeletal structure of wood and wire, and a fleshed-out body of clay, cement and paint.

Topolino (2003) looks like a picked-over carcass. Named after a charming micro-car produced through the 1970s (and Italian for "Mickey Mouse"), Morgin's version reeks of abandonment and decay. The sculpture has patches of smooth ivory skin, but mostly the surface is grainy and cracked, or fallen away in rough chunks. The wire framework is exposed in places, and the rear of the car is little but wooden ribs clogged with curdled cement. An empty socket gapes in place of one headlight, a hungry metal clasp stands in for the other. Morgin attends scrupulously to detail, down to the outdated seat cushion buttons and the simple slats of the dashboard vents.

The toy car, Captain America (2005), is equally compelling and convincing. One side of its pocked, battered body is torn open like ripped flesh, the other deeply dented. The surface appears eaten away by rust. Wooden blocks replace an absent wheel. The car's faded patriotic paint job (stars on hood and trunk, stripes on the side), together with the rest of its sprightly form, have become victims not just of the ordinary vagaries of time but, it seems, a disaster more compact in its violence. The car, and the pint-sized fantasy it represents, look not just corroded but assaulted.

The carousel figures, a pair of horses and a lion (both works 2006), consist only of ghostly fragments of clay clinging to wooden armatures, but they convey a powerful animate energy. One horse's head strains forward. The lion's jaw snarls wide. Snippets of painted ornamentation and the look of wood burnished by contact with generations of bodies trigger a jolt of nostalgia.

Morgin has tremendous agility in conjuring from unfired clay the textures of carved wood, rusted metal, upholstery fabric and molded plastic. Hers is a brilliant, skewed realism, imbued with contradiction. Her subjects are all vehicles, meant to be ridden; her renderings are crippled, deprived of wheels or legs, and fashioned of the ultimate static, earthbound material--clay. The works are at once traces and formidable, newly fashioned presences. They are made through an accretive process that yields the impression of reduction, decomposition. The original referents are playful, spirited objects of leisure; Morgin invests her versions with melancholy and nostalgia. Beauty and loss exert themselves equally and palpably in these memento mori of 20th-century material culture.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning