This article was first published in Bostonia on July 13, 2022. By Sophie Yarin
Excerpt
In May, Oscar Morel graduated from Boston University with a master’s degree in painting—and some anxious thoughts as he looked ahead.
“Anytime you graduate from something, the question is always, what next?” says Morel (CFA’22), now back in his family home in New York City. “It’s dark; it’s the scariest question that someone could ask you.”
It’s a common concern, but in fact, the future looks bright for Morel, a mixed-media artist who spent his time at the College of Fine Arts creating collages based on scenes from his Bronx neighborhood. From July 14 to 30, his MFA work is being displayed alongside that of his classmates at Manhattan’s Morgan Lehman Gallery. At the end of the summer, he’ll take up a residency at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA), and in late fall, he’ll travel to New Hampshire to begin a coveted MacDowell arts fellowship.
At CFA, Morel studied under “forces of nature” like Lucy Kim, an associate professor of art, lecturer Paul Karasik, and Josephine Halvorson, a professor of painting and chair of graduate studies in painting. He took advantage of his surroundings—campus studios—by repurposing other students’ discarded paintings and incorporating them into his collages. His efforts saw impressive rewards. In his final semester, his work was included in two exhibitions—one at the historic Piano Crafts Gallery in Boston’s South End and the other at BU’s Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery—and in May the Boston Globe named him one of its “Six Art-School Stars from Around Boston to Watch in 2022.” At 24, he was the youngest on the list.
Repurposing discarded canvases “was a form of collaboration I had with myself, which other artists didn’t realize,” he says. “Now, leaving that space of immediate collaboration, how will I find it? It’s going to be interesting; maybe I’ll start making my own canvases.”
Morel’s introduction to collage was a combination of inspiration and necessity. The Globe notes that upon his arrival in the city, he brought with him “enough money to pay the rent for an apartment—and that’s about all,” which left him with no resources to purchase art supplies.
The canvases he used for his pieces were either given to him by students who otherwise would have thrown them out or had gone unclaimed in the college’s studios. Morel found that collage, as a form, lent itself to both scavenging and repurposing. Eventually, he focused his technique and conceptual process around the recontextualization of materials, which he likens to the way a music producer uses samples to create a hit song. In Morel’s case, he uses the materials to create distinctive slice-of-life scenes. His collage Knocks on the door depicts a man sitting in his apartment with his dog, and The Tenancy of the Lobby Furnace shows a harrowing incident between two police officers and a civilian.