Not There is proud to present Please Try Again, an exhibition of found material by Los Angeles-based artist Margaret Morgan.

On the third floor of the Yale University Art Gallery, it is not uncommon to hear visitors cautioning one another, in jest, not to poke their eye out on the bottle brush that protrudes from the center of Tu m’ (You Me in English), the last official painting that Marcel Duchamp ever made. The title is a French contraction and an open-ended fragment that abandons its logical attachment to a verb, welcoming the viewer into a camaraderie of jokes between illusory paint handling and real objects; a trompe-l’oeil slash through the canvas held together by real safety pins, and an array of painted color swatches pierced with an actual bolt.

The trio of works in Margaret Morgan’s exhibition Please Try Again share a devotion to the pairing of found materials, and the spirited play with language that have come to define the Duchampian ready-mades—a tension in the mind between the conceptual orientation of the title and the physical fact of the art object. But a deviation from the mechanics of the ready-made occurs in Morgan’s work when the physical absorbs the conceptual; when sticks collected on daily walks and runs through Griffith Park are enlisted to spell out the names of Wi-Fi handles plucked from the ether on her commute from home to studio and back again.

The exhibition is a twinned assemblage of wood and words. The act of collecting necessarily involves displacing a thing, and recontextualizing it somewhere else. By definition, a stick is the part of a tree that has grown furthest away from the trunk and has fallen to the ground, so a stick is always a fragment, rendered from its origin in the branch and reassigned to the dirt.

On Morgan’s daily walks in the park above her home, the impulse to read figures in natural forms like clouds and rock formations (known as Pareidolia) make the typography of trees possible; parts of letter forms emerge in the texture of a piece of bark, or the lithe gesture of sumac grown into a shallow arc. The sticks are material fodder gathered on foot and outdoors, in the hills over the city, while her habit of collecting language happens behind the wheel of her car, in the flatlands of the metropolis. If the former is tied to physical systems of writing with paper and pencil, the later belongs to the disembodied ghosts of digital communication. Like vanity plates and bumper stickers, the Wi-Fi names Morgan encounters along the north-south section she cuts through the city from home to work, are parcels of language bound up with expressions of identity, uttered without responsibility to fact or consequence, or adherence to the conventions of spelling or grammar, turning monikers like fatslag or JabStab into small acts of public recklessness in a sea of default 5G settings, or mean-spirited inside jokes. The work I O U points toward social contract and transactional exchange, as much as it dances in visual and aural word play, with forms that come close to making a face with a mouth that might utter the last three letters of the vowel articulation A-E-I-O-U. A third piece in the exhibition, Finally Home, stands as the only intimate phrase, addressed to the self, and marking Morgan’s return from her journey to the studio.

The list of twenty-six Wi-Fi names that compose Please Try Again, articulated in woody strokes, read like the disparate graphic sources of a ransom note, or the mixing of upper- and lower-case letters in children’s penmanship. In an age when handwriting is waning from daily life, and the relationship between the analog and the digital is contested ground, the graphic irregularity of these twenty-six phrases also summons the distortion of letters and numbers that we routinely encounter in the challenge-response test CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) when browsing the web. It is worth noting that Morgan’s work would be illegible to an artificial intelligence bot.

This body of work has positioned itself in the paradigm shift from the local to the global, the inimitable to the ubiquitous, from the biologically bound utterance of speech to the technological reaches of the telephone and the internet. The psychogeography of Morgan’s project runs an out-and-back route from the arboreal diversity of the park as it descends into the Los Angeles basin, where it traverses a range of demographic shifts in the cultural and socio-economic tapestry of the city. Both the coverage of the Wi-Fi networks caught in her conceptual net, as well as the actual trees from which her sticks have fallen could be thought of as woodlands. Both are landscapes of information delimited by a radius of biological growth or the reach of a signal, and as such, are local and geographically rooted. In the ephemera of Morgan’s constructions we are reminded that a live oak growing beneath the command of the Hollywood sign might offer a hundred-foot canopy of shade for a century or more, while grumpkin-2G might only exist between Sunset and Fountain until the lease is up.