Mandy Morrison

Zig zagging across the United States, with my family as we moved from place to place, I came to know that my body was my only true home. My father was in advertising and his bread and butter go-tos were car ads that sponsored TV Westerns. He would often pose me for location shoots or have me audition for television roles that spoke to pop-culture paradigms of female youth.  This psychic space was at odds with the role foisted upon me as a maternal caregiver for infant siblings well before I was old enough to bear children. Yet, stridently questioning gender norms I imagined my future self as a tuxedo-wearing bride with my husband-to-be sheathed in lace and white satin.

In this way, my body was my point of departure.  I used myself for explorations to consider how  the meat-puppet self gets warped, and shaped to fit into roles, spaces, and expectations.  Through mining this inner landscape (in earlier works Desperado and Padded Room) I began to consider collaborating with others seeking the kind of spontaneity that can occur in group dynamics.   In thinking about architecture and public vs private movement, who and how we are differ vastly when encountering shifting power dynamics.  Working with trained dancers, for the video installation Housekeeping, the corporate hotel room, becomes the stage for a boundary -crossing class divide between professional and domestic workers. And the multi-channel installation, Spirits of Promise and Loss, uses an array of abject ghost characters to inhabit an abandoned outdoor mall – formerly a site of utopian possibility. 

Morrison’s pieces have been performed, exhibited and screened internationally at festivals, galleries and museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Kunstlerhaus e.V., Hamburg, and CINESONIKA in Vancouver. Grants, fellowships and residencies include the Tree of Life Foundation, Maryland State Arts Council, Illinois Arts Council, the New York State Council on the Arts, Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Sacatar Institute in Bahia, Brazil. As an educator she has been faculty at Pratt Institute, Rutgers University, Illinois State University, and a visiting artist at Sarah Lawrence, the University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston, and SUNY Oswego amongst others.   

Mandy is heading to Rotterdam for a three-month residency at Foundation B.a.D. with funding from the Maryland State Arts Council. She is also a nominee for the Sondheim Fellowship and. will have her work in Artscape in Baltimore, Maryland as part of the Semi-Finalists exhibition.

Morrison is the 2021 recipient of a grant from the Tree of Life Foundation, and a 2022 Creativity Grant from the Maryland State Council on the Arts. The funding is in support of the 2022-23 exhibition at the Peale Center (in Baltimore MD) of her video  Journey of the Invader Spirit begun while as an artist-in residence at the Sacatar Institute in Bahia Brazil. This video (work in-progress) operates using the structures and conceits of the Ethnographic film, both riffing on its forms while overturning its colonial premises.

mandymorrisonart.com @mandy_morrisonart