From growing up in Las Vegas and studying Literature, to falling in love with playwriting for fringe theatre in Scotland, and running a small theatre company in the UK…to studying 2D animation at Capilano University, and her subsequent hasty entry into the industry – self-taught, Vancouver-based artist Morgan Noll has travelled and done a lot for someone still in her 20s…

Add to her impressive resume: her first solo art exhibition, currently on the walls of Slice of Life Gallery – but not for much longer! If you haven’t already paid a visit to check out General Electric: Digital Portraits of Soft Electronics – and you too dig “the design sensibilities of the 60s + 70s and want to stare lovingly into the shiny plastic of kitchen appliances” – then consider the pressure ON. Sunday will be too late. Add a social element to your viewing by swinging by on Saturday, September 13th for an afternoon social, from 3-8pm. There will be drinks, pinball, karaoke, plenty of art-lovers and -makers, and a new blue-themed collective art show to check out while you’re there. But in the meantime, find out more about Noll’s story in our whirlwind interview with the artist below:

First of all, please introduce yourself to Scout readers. For starters: What’s your background? How did you end up working in Vancouver as a Background + Visual Development Artist?

I got my MFA in Advanced Theatre Practice from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and ran a little rag-tag theatre company called Somna Theatre Co. with my pals and my partner. By night, I venue managed the downstairs comedy club of the Soho Theatre in London, which mostly consisted of running drink riders for comedians. I adored my work and live arts, and thought “hell yeah”, this was going to be what I’m doing for the rest of my life.

But…you know, in the spring of 2020, just as I was gearing up to put together my first big boy show, Joy Provision! (a weird and wild piece of gig theatre that I am absolutely going to stage in Vancouver some day) we had this little thing called the Global Pandemic. So, basically my entire world crumbled overnight. I was furloughed from my job because no one could perform. I suddenly found myself with a lot of free time. In a mild panic I decided I was going to entirely switch gears to a career in animation. So at the age of 23, during the bulk of that hazy year, I taught myself how to draw from the ground up largely from Youtube tutorials and online art platforms. By that next spring, I was accepted into Capilano University’s 2D Animation course, and a month after graduating, I made it into the industry. So I’ve had a bit of a whirlwind second career in which I’ve gone from ‘could not draw a straight line’ to pro in three blurry years. I still don’t really believe it.

“I like finding the character in a car, clock, or table. I like giving it wear-and-tear, fingerprints, discolouration – all the best traces of human-use. All things are designed by people for use by people, and I like finding the stories a surface can tell you about who owns, made, and uses them.”

Wow – that’s quite the scenic route! What’s keeping you busy these days?

These days I mostly spend my time doing freelance visual development for local and global studios. However, I’m trying to work theatre back into my free time, and just signed on with UBC Players Club to direct their winter mainstage show, an adaptation of Shakespeare in Love. I’m wicked excited. I’ve also picked up chainmailing.

The General Electric show at Slice of Life is your first art exhibition – congrats! How does it feel to check off that box?

Thank you! I adore Slice. It’s so rare, especially in this city, to have a place that nurtures early career artists, outsider artists, and diverse creatives. They truly are a pillar for supporting people who would otherwise, I think, be excluded from engaging in gallery work. So big ups to Sheena and the rest of the crew! It feels great to have exhibited work like that, especially as a digital artist and an animation worker. A lot of our work is remote and very solitary. I’m a major extrovert and most of my life has been getting in a room with others and devising work together. So being able to share those pieces with others and in a tactile way was very rewarding.

Now that you’ve gone through the motions of exhibiting your work once, what’s next for you?

I’d love to take General Electric to more gallery spaces. I think the type of graphic realism style I engage with isn’t seen a lot outside of digital spaces, and people were extremely receptive to it. I was so surprised! It’s definitely lit a fire under me to exhibit more. I’d love to keep bringing it out of the screens. I’m very new to exhibitions though, so mostly I’ll be figuring out who to email first, haha.

Any other goals (artistic or otherwise) that you are eager to accomplish and/or ideas that are running through your mind that you can share with us?

I would love to have a giant coffee maker towering on a wall somewhere. Grander artistic goals for me? I’m still early in my industry career but my dream is to do visual development work for Sony Pictures or Dreamworks within the next five years. I’m an artist because I love narrative, and I’m really excited by what these studios have been creating lately. I would love to make the jump from television to work on a feature film or video games. My end goal is to become an art director.

It probably comes as no surprise that the theme of General Electric (vintage kitchen appliances circa the 1960/70s) piqued Scout’s interest immediately. I’m curious what inspired this series.

Honestly, I’m so glad to hear that! I always think my interests are too niche, but I’ve definitely been proven wrong with this show. People kept coming up to me at the opening to warmly tell me that they remembered some of these appliances in the houses of their relatives growing up. I just love that.

As for the inspirations of this series, it’s a few things! For one, I’m a background and prop artist in the industry, which means I’m always designing for spaces and objects rather than characters. I actually really dislike drawing people, which is kind of atypical in my field. It’s not out of misanthropy though – far from it. It’s actually entirely the opposite. I adore people. I love them so much. I love how complex every person is; I love every idiosyncrasy that makes up a human-being. For me, people are divine. So I feel like I never wholly capture our magic when I try to transfer our likeness to a piece of paper. Something gets lost. So, I try to bestow what I consider to be the highest honour onto objects instead: becoming human. I like finding the character in a car, clock, or table. I like giving it wear-and-tear, fingerprints, discolouration – all the best traces of human-use. All things are designed by people for use by people, and I like finding the stories a surface can tell you about who owns, made, and uses them. With making art of people, I would get so hung-up on if I’d properly captured a likeness. But a toaster? A blender? They’re just so damn happy you even took the time to notice them.

“You’ve never truly lived till your parents are angrily staring at you while holding a plastic burger bun.”

In regards to specifically appliances and the use of the soft electronic design aesthetic, that came from a lot of things that have been brewing in my mind lately about our current relationship with labour, efficiency, minimalism, and frictionlessness in the digital age. Frankly, I feel a lot of affinity for these appliances. They’re clunky, bold, and take up a lot of space. I’ve always felt that way as a person. So much of design for a lot of my life has been about making things thinner. Sleeker. Muted. Demure. Unobtrustive. People are as much of a product of their upbringing as they are of their environments and so I do think we start to internalize those traits as something we ourselves should be. For a lot of people, the worst thing in the world you can be is “cringe”. So I think a bit of the show is me pushing back on that by featuring objects that do fit the cringe label by means of being obtuse and outdated. In their aesthetic undesirableness (by 2025 standards) though, they reveal a lot of things we’ve lost in our everyday objects. They’ve been made with a lot of care, innovation, complex manufacturing, and with longevity in mind.

In the techno-industrial age everything is about reducing friction. Becoming less. I like the tactile buttons, knobs, and switches these machines are covered with because the fiction of having to engage with them reminds me that these machines were about assisting human labour, not replacing it. For me, the ostentaciousness of these appliances feels right. A visual way to honour the services they provide. Perhaps we discredit labour itself when we try to make our world smaller and sleeker. I think kitchen appliances deserve to hog as much counter space and visual attention as they want. What they do is invaluable and this design style honours that.

Are the portraits of actual, physical objects, found images, or something else? Which of the six featured appliances holds a special place in your heart?

The portraits themselves are a mixture of references. I like to scour thrift stores for appliances I can take pictures of. A lot of them are Frankenstein-ed together with different types of design models. I like to try to be transformative with my design and incorporate a lot of little pieces from multiple product models. The coffee maker holds the warmest place in my heart. It’s the one that I started with that snowballed into this show.

In your current day-to-day life, which kitchen appliance can you not live without, and why?

My mint green Smeg coffee maker. We call her ‘Smegan the Stallion’. Every morning, Smegan chimes cheerfully at 6:30am. I adore her. We cover her in stickers. Every appliance in my house is covered in stickers. Maybe it’s me giving a token of my appreciation for their work.

Which one is the most nostalgic for you, and how does it figure into your upbringing/past?

This is so silly, and not strictly a kitchen appliance, but the honest answer on what machine is most nostalgic for me is the novelty hamburger phone we had growing up. This was already a relic when I was a kid. My parents got one because I think it was also nostalgic for them. I loved it. I loved that it was allowed to be weird and kind of ugly. It also, hilariously was my downfall once. As a kid I had gotten caught for being at a friend’s house when I wasn’t supposed to. Their parents threatened to call my parents. So I ran home and unplugged all the land lines, thinking myself mighty clever. Guess which one I forgot? You’ve never truly lived till your parents are angrily staring at you while holding a plastic burger bun.

Finally, I love how each of the appliances is imbued with a personal (and very angry) post-it note. Clearly, there’s a story here…which makes total sense, considering your background as a playwright/director, and general penchant for storytelling. I have to ask: who is Kevin, and what’s his deal??? Please fill me in on the backstory!

Kevin is a Juanian adversarial concept. Everyone has a Kevin. Everyone has worked with a Kevin. Your Boss might even be a Kevin. They mean well, so you don’t have to the heart to hate them or let them go but their sheer incompetence requires round the clock monitoring and teams of behind-the-scenes work, like the Y2K epidemic engineers, to avoid a daily disaster.

I just loved the idea of these all existing in the same diner kitchen, and this one poor dude who menaced the place. I also wanted to add an environmental story element to each of these pieces, as I think it makes them feel more lived in, and I learned from another piece of mine that adding in that storytelling really helps a viewer connect. I did a concept art piece of a dive bar and I added in an old man in a birthday hat all alone, bitterly staring at his phone. I captioned the piece online “I guess everyone forgot”. People flooded my Twitter DMs for days saying how sad they were for him. How could I do this to him. Haha. I felt so bad! But it was a great realization how much a human element adds.

The only note that was inspired by a true event was the microwaving sauerkraut bit. That came from my dad who actually did that once in the middle of July in a house with no A/C. I don’t think we’ll ever forgive him. (Love you, Dad.)