Portrait of Mandy Morrison
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Mandy Morrison

Dance, Multidisciplinary, Multidisciplinary Art, Performance, Sculpture / Installation, Visual / Media

Through my family’s moves across the continental U.S., I came to know my body as my true home. With shifting geographies, my sense of self was always evolving as notions of belonging, was dependent on location.

Using my own self in early video works was a way to consider how the body is shaped to fit into certain roles, and expectations.  It was through mining this inner landscape that I began to consider the meaning generated through learned movements and behaviors and conversely how these assumptions are challenged.

Gradually the focus of my work has expanded to consider how architectural, psychological, and mediated spaces are configured to shape the experiences of the larger body politic.

In my evolving my process, I have been collaborating with others bringing them into dialogue with this practice to generate the types of possibilities that occur through group efforts.  Working with participants, the pieces initially focus on physical space, or ideas about what space and its ideologies can signify to ground their meaning.

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to work with youth groups, community participants, dance practitioners, martial arts groups and hospitality workers.   And I have included myself in a number of the pieces. In this way, the works interrogate how relationships are informed or defined by established, physical, corporatized, or digital environments. In furthering my process this work seeks to confront and expand how we relate to and experience  the world.

About the Artist

Mandy Morrison uses aspects of narrative to create video and performance work that explore how the body projects itself in varying contexts. Her performance, video and film pieces have been exhibited and screened internationally in galleries, museums, and festivals including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Kunstlerhaus e.V., Hamburg, and CINESONIKA in Vancouver. Her work has been written about in Artforum, Frieze magazine, the New Art Examiner, Szene Hamburg and Art Papers. As a distinguished educator she has been visiting faculty at Pratt Institute, Rutgers University, and a Visiting Artist at the University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin, and Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston.   She has participated in residencies at the Center for Metamedia in the Czech Republic, the Blue Sky Artist's Residency Program in rural Illinois, Ohio’s Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Sacatar Institute in Bahia Brazil. Additionally she has been an Artist-in-Residence at the University of Minnesota, and  University of Wisconsin, Madison.  Grants and honors include fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, the Council on the Arts and Humanities on Staten Island, the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the Maryland State Council on the Arts, and the Tree of Life Foundation. In 2023, She had a sole exhibit of her work “Journey of the Invader Spirit”  at the Peale Center, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Mandy Morrison website https://bakerartist.org/portfolios/mandy-morrison

Featured Work

Photos

Video Still printed on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Matte Rag, 11 x 19 inches, signed and numbered verso, limited edition of 10. This 15-minute video installation, Journey of the Invader Spirit exhibited at the Peale Center, in 2023, weaves an invented creation myth with harsh environmental realities and metaphors for sustainable possibility. Concept: In the video, a pernicious illegitimate ‘Invader Spirit’ travels the land blithely wreaking havoc on the local population by way of boundless forms of consumer lust, then later, punishing with detritus and waste. Eventually, the Spirit’s malevolence gets challenged a by a team of artful Capoeira (Afro-Brazilian) martial arts practitioners working with the aid of angelic oceanic agents.

Videos

  • Spooks

    See more information about Spooks
    Within the digital universe, is the GIF file. A MEME of connective tissue, it is easily made, replicated and shared through social media. It has inadvertently become an ephemeral means of social bonding, wherein visual snatches of everyday life, operating within infinite moments of repetitive gestures, and gaffes, are created in hoped for recognition through remunerative clicks, downloads, and widespread monetization.

    In reflecting on the GIF, and the economies in which it is embedded, I borrowed text from the book “The Road to Unfreedom” (by historian Timothy Snyder) and in eliminating most of the words from the chapter’s first page, the dictum becomes almost Buddhist in its reflection.
    Medium: Video
    Year: 2021
    Details: 02:26 (Loop) Single channel Video

  • Journey of the Invader Spirit (excerpt) 02:14

    See more information about Journey of the Invader Spirit (excerpt) 02:14
    An edited version of the 14 minute video "Journey of the Invader Spirit". . Filmed in Brazil, with local participants, a pernicious ‘Invader Spirit’ travels the land wreaking environmental havoc on the population. The Invader then gets challenged by ‘unseen forces’; micro-algae (represented by Capoeira practitioners) founds in marine life that take on in the form of spiritual entities.

    (Use of music by obtained with permission from Artista, Intérprete: Eudoxia De Barros (2002), Distribuidora de CDs: Paulinas, Brasil: Have signed documentation)
    Medium: Video (Installation)
    Year: 2023

  • Spirits of Promise and Loss

    See more information about Spirits of Promise and Loss
    This piece uses photographic images the Old Town Mall in Baltimore as a backdrop for the behaviors of ghost-like characters that populate a former model of utopian possibility. Old Town Mall was one of numerous experiments across the U.S. in urban mall development that strove to bring mid-century suburban shoppers, back downtown. Initially popular, the Old Town Mall is now mostly abandoned. This free-standing six-channel rear-projected video installation, standing four feet tall and over forty feet long, with panels hinged at an angle from each adjoining panel, references the Asian screen, once a popular decorative device used to separate interior spaces. With China as a competing economic power that has usurped the manufacturing base that was once the economic mainstay of U.S. cities such as Baltimore, the piece is a contemporary media work, which speaks to urban entropy, underscoring current class and cultural partitions.
    Medium: Multi-channle video installation with audio
    Year: 2020
    Details: Duration: 02:35 Loop 4' x 41'

  • Boxed

    See more information about Boxed
    Performers: Mandy Morrison, Samantha Siegel, Tiara Francis

    As the American proclivity of success and achievement is partially defined by ‘having a roof over one’s head’, living apart from this norm, segregates those who have neither and casts them as ‘disposable’. Just as unwanted furniture and empty boxes are left in the street for garbage pick-up, those who are unable to participate in consumerist class norms are viewed as unclean and -in turn- unworthy outcasts; victims of their corporeal existence. Unable to benefit from or participate in the ‘disruptive’ digital age, they make shelter out of cardboard and exist in the marginal cracks of exterior physical spaces.
    Medium: Two-channel video installation (Mapped projections on panels and boxes)
    Year: 2017
    Details: Duration: 02:25 (loop) Dimensions: 10’ 6” x 37’ x 7’3”

Booking

Booking Price: $500-$1,000

Performances
Solo and Group-Participation available
Contact: morrisonmandyart@gmail.com
Phone: 347 742 6143

Projectors (if available-I also have)
Speakers
Extension cords
Microphone

Willing to travel to all parts of the state

Nancy Proctor, Founding Director, The Peale Center, Baltimore MD, CSO@thepealecenter.org
Tim Nohe, Professor of Art, UMBC, Baltimore, MD, noeh@umbc.edu
Caterina Verde, Artist/Director, Peat and Repeat (Artist Editions)-peatandrepeat20@gmail.com