Morgan Sears-Williams
Vancouver, BC
ARTIST BIO
Morgan’s practice embraces an embodied and personal reflection on her own relationships to gender, the body and queer community while speaking to larger societal structures of power, oppression and social constructions of space. Investigating the use of analog film both as a form of projected image and as a sculptural material, Morgan’s art practice focuses on how lived experiences inform queer aesthetics and articulations of memory and gender. Considering space and queerness through analog technologies, she creates experimental topographies through photographic film and moving images. Using organic film developers (also known as eco-processing) necessitates the artist to work directly with the film, resulting in an intimate collaboration among material, concept, and aesthetic. Artefacts made by both artist and place reflect the act of image making and the obscuring of queer bodies in a cultural landscape which constantly demands queer people defend their right to exist. Integrating analog equipment into her installations, she challenges the masculinist fetishizing of these machines and instead sees them as co-conspirators, objects that have their own agency, speaking to analog histories, and questions of access and sexism. Bridging eco-processing, experimental film and queer history (both personal and political) she aims to create intimate experiences for viewers to expand their ideas of queer space and time. Morgan’s efforts in queer place-making through experimental practices question contemporary and historical views of gender and sexuality within visual culture.
She has exhibited her works at Gallery 44 (Toronto), The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Vancouver), Left Contemporary (Windsor), The 8Fest (Toronto), ACME Obscura (La Coruna, Spain) and S(8) Festival (Madrid, Spain). In support of her artwork and research, Morgan received the graduate scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in 2023, and has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.
PROJECT STATEMENT
Examining the physical and imaginary erosion occurring at Hanlan’s Point Beach on the Toronto Islands, "fixed in place" is a vessel for both solitary and communal experiences. Hanlan’s Point Beach was the site of Canada’s first ever Pride celebration in 1971. As important gathering place for the city’s queer community, it is Canada’s oldest queer space, and one of the oldest continuously queer spaces in the world. This project holds joy and desire simultaneously, along with the grief and loss experienced in queer spaces through personal and physical erosion.
This project uses techniques such as burying analog film into the sand dunes and intervening onto the 16mm frame by hole punching negatives, foregrounding a DIY and handmade film practice. Using medium format photography to document the intricate cruising paths that surround the beach and 16mm moving image film to capture the most visually eroded area of the beach, the negatives are then buried in the sand dunes that are integral in retaining the structure of the island. The new images that emerge from this process illustrate the emulsion eroding from acetate morphed by elements: sand, water, insects, humidity and dirt. The artefacts left on the emulsion question how an art practice can be in collaboration with a place.
Combining footage of lovers kissing with the water of Lake Ontario, the hole punch acts as a type of peephole, mirroring the cruising areas on the beach that allow for spectatorship or participation. The choice to look at queer kissing is multifaceted, speaking to the histories of queer activism like kiss-in protests of the 1970s.
"fixed in place" is an experimental documentary approach to place, generating newly emerging discourse around image-making within sites of queerness by reflecting on contemporary social struggles of trans and queer communities.
