Artist News: Mandy Morrison
Peat and Repeat is excited to present two series of prints from Mandy Morrison’s video works: Spooks and Housekeeping. Mandy is the recent recipient of a Maryland Council on The Arts grant and a Tree of Life Grant. She is currently working on a new work, Journey of the Invader Spirit, that was inspired by her residency at the Sacatar Institute, in Bahia, Brazil.
Housekeeping
Housekeeping I, 2017/2022 (print), edition of 7, with 2 APs, printed on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Matte Rag, 24 x 30 inches
“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.
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. Mining this inner landscape, 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. “
Housekeeping IV, 2017/2022 (print), edition of 7, with 2 APs, printed on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Matte Rag, 24 x 30 inches
Morrison’s video, Housekeeping references the slapstick comedies of the silent films, where working-class people, encounter circumstances that challenge their limitations.
“I thought about famous ‘Bad Behavior ‘incidents occurring in hotel rooms usually perpetrated by the famous; such as in journalists (Hunter S. Thompson) rock n’rollers (Keith Moon of the Who), Hollywood stars( Russell Crowe) and the International Monetary Fund Director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn who sexually assaulted a hotel housekeeper. In the back of my mind was always the question; who cleans up the mess? Hotel ‘Housekeeping’ of course. I wanted to flip the narrative so that, the staff has the upper hand.
In this situation, maids take on a ‘guest’ by straightening her bedspread, beating her with brooms or mopping her naked body on a bathroom floor. The background audio plays an ad for anti-aging products, along with the sounds of running water, and an aria from ‘La Traviata’.”
Housekeeping, 2018, Single Channel Video Installation (projection with audio)
Duration: 01:36
Installation Dimensions: 9.5’ x 16’ Link: https://vimeo.com/267043346
Performers: Mandy Morrison, Tiara Francis, Samantha Siegel
Housekeeping II, 2017/2022 (print), edition of 7, with 2 APs, printed on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Matte Rag, 24 x 30 inches
Spooks
Spooks I, 2021, printed on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Matte Rag, edition of 30 signed verso, 13 x 19 inches
“As the site of tents, tarp and makeshift shelters become common signs of the disenfranchised throughout cities, I photographed tattered tarps cum ‘tents’ littered with holes. In the video, the holes are plugged in with random GIF’s which I see as a form of connective tissue that are widely shared through social media. In them visual snatches of everyday people, cartoons, animals and celebrities, operate within infinite moments of repetitive gestures, and gaffes. “
Spooks II, 2021, printed on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Matte Rag, edition of 30 signed verso, 13 x 19 inches
“Created in hoped-for recognition through remunerative clicks, and widespread monetization, I thought about a passage from the book “The Road to Unfreedom” by historian, Timothy Snyder. In eliminating much of the text from this chapter’s first page, and keeping only core words and phrases, in the context of this video, the dictum becomes almost Buddhist in its reflection on the repetitive nature and ubiquity of the GIF MEME.”
Spooks IV, 2021, printed on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Matte Rag, edition of 30 signed verso, 13 x 19 inches
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.
Morrison is a 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.
