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Artist's Statement
Marcus Morris (bio)
My work explores liberation via imagemaking. I am interested in the way photography and the moving image can be used as tools for personal and global liberty. I explore this with traditional and alternative photographic methods, video, installation, and performance.
Elegance Is Refusal, my current project, aims to reimagine the past by making new images where trauma existed. Beloved by Toni Morrison provides a loose framework for engaging childhood trauma as a Black queer millennial in Appalachian Ohio. Elegance, to me a feminine of "cool," long associated with Black culture, considers Black queer and femme identity as a source of power and refusal in a white supremacist patriarchal capitalist system. Elegance Is Refusal comes from the editor Diana Vreeland, who says, "Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal." The project employs theatrical costuming to set the stage of a Reconstruction-era landscape. Working with Xavier Cruz, cast to play my younger self, I engage race, gender, sexuality, history, class, and the promise of liberty via queer mothering. The series of images and video is made near land my family has occupied in Ohio since being emancipated in the early 19th century.
Reclaiming history and identity in my art practice feels essential for liberation. Catharsis that happens in the photographic process, even without reconciliation, can be freeing. One can make a picture, find peace, and move on. It is an offering to the invisible Black, queer, and Appalachian people who were ghosts so I could be in the wild. [End Page 59]
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Marcus Morris
MARCUS MORRIS is a multidisciplinary artist and imagemaker from Appalachia whose work centers queerness and performance. He is an MFA fellow in Photography from The Ohio State University and received his BFA from Columbus College of Art & Design in 2012. In addition, he spent six months studying art and photography at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa. He has exhibited work at NoPlace Gallery, Herron Gallery, 934 Gallery, ROY G BIV and Urban Arts Space. He is a founder of Cineseries, an experimental film program series at The Wexner Center for the Arts, was recipient of the Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, and is co-curator of the 2024 Fotofocus Biennale at Beeler Gallery. He is a graduate teaching associate at The Ohio State University.