ILY2 is proud to announce Instantly & Effortlessly, an exhibition of new work by Morgan Buck. This is Buck’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view at ILY2 New York from November 14 through December 20, 2025, with an opening reception on Friday, November 14, from 6 - 8 PM.
The relationship between effort and reward is fundamental to behavioral theory, from ecology to economics. In animals, this reconciliation occurs via the mesolimbic circuit, a phylogenetically ancient pathway within the brain’s reward system that influences motivation, reward, and pleasure through the release of dopamine. When functioning properly, this process promotes an enhanced willingness to engage in effortful actions to obtain future rewards. When dysregulated, the animal’s willingness to pursue an award - both in terms of time and effort - diminishes.
Today, humans do not need to work so hard for their dopamine. It is widely accessible through a variety of instantaneous and effortless sources. The ease of consumption has fostered an aversion to effort, which, under the constraints of capitalism, is frowned upon. The $38 billion self-help industry is flooded with content on how to increase productivity and resensitize dopamine receptors - effort once again reduced to spectacle; attention a commodity bought and sold at the speed of a scroll.
In his practice, Buck culls from this never-ending wellspring of cheap gratification, where meaning becomes warped amid overwhelming surface volume. Images are collected from the seedy underbelly of digital glut - social media, message boards, AI visual generation and amateur video - and aggregated into strange new compositions. Seemingly unrelated text captions complicate the viewer’s ability to situate each scene within a plausible narrative realm - the philosophical musings of a common field mouse; the memorializing of a capitalist mascot; the rebranding of Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece” via Nike swoosh. Executed in acrylic on canvas, airbrushed with deliberate care, his works emphasize the physicality of process - a reminder of materiality amid the relentless ephemerality of image saturation.
The resulting paintings pillage the art canon and pedestrianize its grandeur while lending depth and meaning to the mundane. Each layered composition reflects a reverence for the humor, depravity, and immediacy of quick-scroll culture, alongside a deep engagement with the technical possibilities and limitations of painting that resists commodified immediacy. Through these processes, Buck explores the shadows cast by the digital age, where saturation blurs the lines between high and low, between the romanticization of the past, the banality of the present, and the fears of the future.
Morgan Buck (b. 1985, Portland, Oregon) holds an MFA from Oregon College of Art and Craft and a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. He was awarded a 2023 Golden Spot Residency by Portland Institute of Contemporary Art and the Pilotenkueche Residency in Leipzig, Germany in 2017. Buck has held solo exhibitions at Upfor Gallery (Portland), Kunstraum Ping Pong (Leipzig) among others, and has been included in group exhibitions at ILY2 (Portland), Museum of Museums (Seattle), Hoffman Gallery (Portland), Pilotenkueche (Leipzig), Salon Similde (Leipzig).
