“King”
Jesus Morales (NY) & Gabe Seamon (Toronto)
“King” delves into the influence of web culture and its affordances in the construction and dissemination of allegories of masculinity. Drawing on Kurt Schwitters’ Merz Picture 32 A. The Cherry Picture — and how artists use fragmentation, appropriation, ready-mades, and text-based art to remove manufactured content from its context, underlining how the medium shapes meaning and ideology.
How can we capture mutable content, images, and words in perpetual circulation, and avoid flattening or distorting them? The work Merz Picture 32A belongs to the so-called Merz series, a term that Schwitters took from a fragment of the German word ‘Kommerz,’ or commerce.”: “Schwitters loves all the things that are tossed off in modern culture […] He spoke of pulling together the fragments of a culture that had been shattered, and his ‘Merz’ work serves as an analogy for a world that could not be put together as a whole.” Using found objects, texts, and content means accepting their lyricism, the abundance of information they hold—things that can’t be possessed, only assembled. This impossibility of containing reflects web culture: redistribution, rebroadcasting, duplication, and personalization. In Morales’ work, the provenance of the images remains blurred, without the works losing their coherence. This reappropriation is so natural to the artist that there is no difference between a photo taken by him, or one that could have been taken by him. For example, unlike the two portraits taken by Morales in the exhibition, LaFuria (2021) was found on Google Maps somewhere in Venezuela, while Untitled (2024) was taken and sent by the artist’s father to him via his Samsung Galaxy A54. I don’t know whether this is what lends such a familiar tone to his works, or rather it’s the many commercial objects we find throughout them: cigarettes, hats, shoes, mobiles. We know products, we have an idea of what they mean, what they’re made of, how much they cost, and they, more than other things, feel close to home.
sabboom •5mo ago
Yes men are called king. It’s a fad and it’s stupid imho.
BrockSamsonLikesButt •5mo ago
Yes. However, as a gay man, it triggers my gaydar when a guy calls another man “king.” […]
Juniorchickenhoe 3y ago As a woman, I wanna say, I love masculinity. There is nothing more attractive than a man who […], conquers his demons and elevates himself through discipline, bravery, endurance, and dignity.
-Comment arrangements from Reddit.com
“De Tocqueville, in earlier work on the French Revolution, had explained how it was the printed word that, achieving cultural saturation in the eighteenth century, had homogenized the French nation. Frenchmen were the same kind of people from north to south. The typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society.”
During the commercial boom in television and graphic design, many American Pop artists often depicted ordinary nouns and verbs in the sorts of fonts found in advertising and magazines, taking them out of context to demonstrate how graphic design can drain language of its meaning. In a similar vein, Gabe Seamon’s text-based works question written language and the loss of its original meaning, coated with additional information that is not only graphic, but also algorithmic. In the context of this show, I found it interesting to think that Pop Art has gone by many names: Capitalist Realism in Germany and Nouveau Réalisme in France. I found these movement names more striking and critical of the ideology that dominated the world in which they were born. I’m thinking of the German artist Sigmar Polke, who works on the proliferation and dissemination of commercial images, replicating not only their content, but also their production method. In Seamon’s video Touchdown, With You (2022), a fan-based montage of a Football game is manually reframed by the artist’s movements and a new selected soundtrack. The real event that took place, in this case, the game, is not so much the subject as the video itself, the vehicle through which the allegory circulates. The medium is never neutral; it is ideological and contains points of view that shape its architecture and affordances.
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Jesus Morales Jesus Morales (b. 1998) is from Queens, New York. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union in 2020. Recent group exhibitions include King, Sophie présente, Montreal (2025), Erosion of a Psalm, Aro, Mexico City (2024), Staircase Wit, Shower, Seoul, SK (2023), and Untitled, Meantime Co., New York, NY (2022).
Gabe Seamon (b. Toronto, ON) is a visual artist who works across video, performance, painting, drawing, and sculpture. Seamon received his BFA in Intermedia at Concordia University in Montréal, QC, and his MFA in Studio Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. His work has been shown internationally at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York, NY and AUTOMAT Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, among others. He has exhibited nationally in Montréal, QC at Eastern Bloc and Gham & Dafe and in Toronto, ON at 100 Garage.