The Assemblages

Morris Nathanson's most distinctive work was built from fragments salvaged out of the abandoned jewelry and textile factories of his hometown, Pawtucket, Rhode Island — the very material of a dying industry. Several works are mounted in wooden boxes from the same factories, frame and contents both reclaimed. The subjects range across Morris's whole imaginative world, but the material is always the same: the wreckage of one place. Where many of his paintings and prints record the mill world as it emptied out, the assemblages refuse to accept that disappearance, rebuilding what was left behind into something that endures.