James Gold | Infinite Scroll
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 11, 6-8 pm
Morgan Lehman Gallery is pleased to host Infinite Scroll, a solo exhibition of new paintings by James Gold. Using a palette of pale earth tones punctuated by garnet and sapphire hues, Gold presents mosaic-like paintings structured into crystalline grids. Moving square by square across these lattices, he navigates each work like a board game, drawing on ancient designs such as a Minoan game board excavated at Knossos, a Bronze Age archaeological site on Crete. Each cell becomes a tiny painting within the whole, in turns resembling a gem-cut stone, a fragment of tapestry, or a glowing pixel from an early video game. The result is a matrix where centuries fold into one another.
Gold’s work is shaped by his time in Italy as a Fulbright Fellow and his participation in an archaeological project in Cyprus. His practice draws on a wide field of reference: archaeological diagrams, mosaic floors, woven textiles, his own collaged book projects, and the pixel logic of the digital screen. These compositions suggest a continuum where ancient storytelling and contemporary image culture are intertwined threads of the same visual language. Across his surfaces, he stages a dialogue between what is revealed and what remains concealed, between the façade and the guarded interior, inviting viewers to imagine worlds that extend beyond the painting’s edge.
Working with sandy-textured gesso, India ink, egg tempera, and acrylic gouache, Gold builds lustrous, tactile surfaces that shimmer with the illusion of marble, tapestry, and papyrus. These paintings are speculative artifacts, at once futuristic and archaeological, emerging from a process of translation that is deliberate and decidedly human in contrast to the speed of algorithmic pixelation. Infinite Scroll invites us to linger in the pleasure of looking, drifting through color, material, and historical fragments toward each painting’s luminous entirety.
James Gold (b. 1990, Pittsburgh, PA) is a New York–based artist whose work explores intersections of history, material, and transformation. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from Boston University. He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in Painting to Italy, has participated in an archaeological field project in Cyprus, and was recently an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA.
