Exhibit shows potential, and need for focus

Bottom line: A solo show highlighting a gifted artist with great potential and skill in need of a clearer mission.

The foundation of artist Morgan Alexander’s sculptures and paintings at Swan Coach House Gallery are reclaimed beehives. He uses them for his sculptures, burning the exteriors of five beehives to turn them a charred, sepulchral black. He uses the beehives’ wooden slats as the backdrop to wall pieces that hover between sculpture and painting.

It’s no wonder that Alexander holds BFAs in both sculpture and painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design. His obvious fascination with those beehives seems deeply invested in a sculptor’s love of material even as his paintings seem to yearn for representation, often suggesting landscapes of sky and earth and delivering a powerful feeling of meditation and transcendence.

Alexander is the winner of the Forward Art Foundation’s 2013-2014 Emerging Artist Award, an honor given to an artist who has not yet had a major solo exhibition and is without gallery representation. Alexander’s work is on display at Swan Coach House Gallery alongside the four finalists for that award: Nikki Starz, Chelsea Raflo, Rebecca Hanna and Brendan Danielsson.

The title of Alexander’s solo exhibition, “Remembering, Forgetting, and Remembering Again,” is echoed in his technique. The artist’s method of sandwiching reclaimed beehive wood, lead, steel and paint behind glass becomes a physical means of suggesting the hazy operations of memory, which tends to cloud over and distort with the passage of time.

Using mark-making to both deny and deliver access, Alexander scours marks onto the glass, uses paint to create evocative shapes on the wood and etches his metal surfaces. Suggesting, but never fully delivering, Alexander employs this layering effect to allow only fleeting glimpses of a view that remains ever elusive, like life seen through a telescope smeared with Vaseline.

In “No Title — Are These the Voices of Our Departed, or Is It Just the Gramophone? #12” Alexander has used paint applied to the reclaimed beehive wood to suggest what might be a foggy landscape, more imagined than real. A long, lonely white plain gives way to a dark brown sky, and the layer of opaque glass seals that view behind a morphing lens.

Other works suggest more formal interests as in “No Title — Are These the Voices of Our Departed, or Is It Just the Gramophone? #15,” in which Alexander paints his wooden backdrops in light and dark tones split vertically. Where the show at some moments conveys a powerful investment in nature and its forms — from beehives, to swarms, to horizon — at other moments Alexander seems under the sway of pure form, more interested in evoking a mood than anything.

One of Alexander’s most successful endeavors on that front is “Installation Drawing (Population)” placed at the entrance to his show. In that work, various white cloudlike forms are perched on black pins grouped in clusters. The objects suggest some unspecified population or measurement placed on a map. As sculpture, the piece is visually riveting with its fat orbs balanced on pinheads. Even more appealing is the fact that Alexander has fashioned those orbs from salt, which demonstrates a technical skill in translating something so ordinary into something so sublime.

Alexander is clearly an artist of many, varied interests. Exhibition notes indicate his current research into both 19th-century photography techniques and the Japanese horticultural art of bonsai. Exploration is any artist’s lifeblood, a way to discover new directions for work. But exploration can be frustrating for viewers when that thought process translates to tentative, unfocused work. Alexander’s work is polished and refined, his effect dreamy and poetic, but the show itself often feels like the exploratory work of an artist grappling with too many different techniques, ideas and inspirations.