Matthew
Morrocco’s exhibition Orchid: RGB is, at its heart, about photography itself.
To take a picture, two things need to exist: light, which is seen with the
naked eye as an image of colors, and secondly, a way to convey the image. This
basic communicative act, the transmission of color, is fundamental to the
artist’s new series of works, which revolve around “Orchid,” a nameless,
genderless figure posing in various landscapes of abstract RGB color fields.
They are a nod to both Ellsworth Kelly, a Color Field painter who pioneered
shaped, monochrome canvases, and the RGB color system, a standardized method of
mixing colored light for digital display.
What’s
notable here is that portraiture is typically about seeing someone, but in
Morrocco’s images, there’s no one to be seen. Rather, it’s a generalized queer
subject, hiding in plain sight; a full body suit obscures everything, including
the face. Made colorful and formal, Orchid strikes classical poses or holds up
mirrors as if playing a cheeky game of hide-and-seek, in which identification
never wins. Sometimes the camera takes center stage, framed in the center of an
image, like the dancing video camera in Dziga Vertov’s The Man With the Movie
Camera (1929) before it comes fully to life. Here, however, the focus is not on
the camera per se, but the iPhones, iPads, and other devices that have largely
replaced it, and that increasingly filter our real-time experiences.
Orchid: RGB
is the first in a series of exhibitions about light, color, and time that Matthew
Morrocco that will present over the course of 2018-2019. Crush Curatorial will
host the second iteration of this project, called Orchid, Seasons, in September
2018.
Matthew
Morrocco (b. 1989, Providence, RI) received a BA in Critical Theory and Photography
from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2012 and an MFA in Visual
Art from Columbia University in 2015. His work has received grant support from
the New York Foundation of the Arts, a blade of grass, NYU, and Columbia
University. Recent exhibitions include Medium of Desire at the Leslie Lohman
Museum and Complicit at NYU’s Gallatin Gallery. His book, Complicit, will be
published in September 2018 with Matte Editions.
Wednesday
August 15 2018 - Sunday August 26 2018
Venue name:
Pioneer Works
Address:
159 Pioneer St
Brooklyn 11231
Cross
street: between Conover and Van Brunt Sts
Opening
hours: Wed–Sun noon–7pmTransport: Subway: A C to Jay St.-MetroTech, then B61 to
Red Hook (King street bus stop) F G to Carroll St, then a 15 min walk through
Carroll gardens. F G to Smith-9th St., then B61 to Red Hook (King street bus
stop) or walk R 2 3 4 5 to Borough Hall, then B61 to Red Hook.
Event
website: https://pioneerworks.org/
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