GNATLAND:

GNATLAND: NEON ORGANISMS OF THE NEW AGE is an exhibition of work by Morgan Hardigree and JASON KASH, two artists who are currently participating in Bridge Work, a 9-month program that cultivates the next steps for emerging artists to advance their professional practices. During the past several months, the artists have been working at studios provided by the Lexington Art League, our partner in this program since 2024. They regularly meet with arts professionals to receive feedback and develop their ideas and the specific artworks on view here. In this exhibition, Hardigree’s neon-drenched worlds and Kash’s biomorphic assemblages come together to explore notions of transformation as a personal and material process.

Hardigree renders her fantastical, trans-affirming compositions in colored pencil on paper, presenting them in elaborately adorned frames and, at times, within environments embellished with paint-splattered detritus—torn plastic bags, draped metallic tinsel, and eruptions of artificial foliage. This witchy brew of visual and material excess generates a personal mythology of self-representation that is at once defiant and jubilant: through her constructed scenes and confrontational nudes, Hardigree expresses a profound love for her own body, as well as an indictment against a culture determined to cast the trans body as grotesque. She states, "May we all find love in ourselves in a world that aims to stamp it out, and may that love shine a bright neon-pink."  

Inspired by concepts from neurobiology and psychoanalysis, Kash builds layered sculptures by combining industrial materials and found objects in variously visceral ways. Pumps and bug zappers animate some works, while others are infused with liquids that allude to bodily fluids. Grotesque mash-ups of human and machine, the natural and the synthetic, and repurposed religious symbolism, his assemblages function as altars to the sacred and profane, probing our collective desire for ritual and meaning. As Kash notes, his work emerges from a moment “where technological advancement and ecological disaster are revealing humanity’s interconnection with the environment,” a tension that charges each piece with both urgency and discomfort.

In dialogue with each other and the gallery architecture at 2nd Story, this exhibition forms a charged ecosystem where aspects of identity and excess can be examined. Both artists are committed to breaking down traditional thinking about bodies, ethics, and contemporary life.  

The program is in collaboration with Bridge Work cohorts hosted by Plum Blossom Initiative, (Milwaukee, WI) and the Art and Lit Lab (Madison, WI).