MARGARET MORGAN: Love Must Be Reinvented

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to present Margaret Morgan: Love Must Be Reinvented, a solo exhibition of text-based installations and works on paper. The exhibition runs from January 11 to February 22, 2025, with an opening reception from 4 to 7 p.m. on Saturday, February 1, 2025.

Love Must Be Reinvented; a prompt artist Margaret Morgan adopted from Godard’s film, Pierrot le Fou, in which the protagonist recites the poet Rimbaud whose invocation of “love reinvented” was set against bourgeois society’s hetero norms of marriage and family. For Morgan, well aware of the women’s varied roles, such a directive works within motherhood, not against it. Morgan states,

Domesticity and mothering are nothing if not creative—improvisational, performative, durational, an assemblage that can transform broken things into treasures: mothering knows how to make do. ‘Mothering’ is a term I use broadly to include all manners of caregiving and nurturance, maintenance, and actions sustaining life. These activities come from love, not hate. So yes, ‘Love Must Be Reinvented’—just not in the way Rimbaud intended.

Margaret Morgan: Love Must Be Reinvented brings together three distinctive series of framed works on paper and text installations developed through her praxis of walks in Griffith Park and her fascination with pareidolia—the ability to draw patterns and meaning out of random objects. Such ruminations have fostered an artistic impulse to create with daily discoveries—found twigs evoking letters of the alphabet, nurturing quotes distilled from classic literature, films, plays, sage affirmations, adopted images, and ephemera—collected and treasured to shape a visual vocabulary of Morgan’s own. Morgan’s poetic tour de force stands in her dedication to finding value in the everyday—from wandering hikes to raising children, communal acts of care, and salvaging—to evoke a multi-sensorial stream of consciousness of language, touch, sight, and emotions, drawn from fleeting moments that often go ignored. 

Morgan hones in on the sense of touch and its vital connection to care, making, and creating as a means for reinventing love. Through collages featuring torn paper, drawings, photographs, and text works, the artist invites viewers to adapt practices of curiosity, looking for clues in the works and the daily world, finding letters in twigs and pictures in the clouds, and drawing meaning and comfort through the vagaries of life.