Devin N. Morris “Play Too Much”

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What camera function does a living room perform? Lens, keeper, flash? The events that occur within this seemingly private space position the subjective body to be confronted, welcomed and familiarized over time. Framing borderless spaces, Play Too Much considers standing furniture and domestic environments in relationship to transcendence, performance, ownership, innocence and desire. Morris builds environments in ways similar to a contractor each surface considered for its purpose and engineered to withstand use. However, unlike a contractor, Morris reimagines the operative properties of domestic objects as narrative surfaces and honors past experiences, deceased elders, disease and familial relations. Constructing tender exchanges, emotionally rendered figures daydream domestic mobility, fraternal and otherwise. Queer environments, rarely found, are more insistently exposed.

Having moved often in his childhood, Morris posits familiar but distant narratives that exist beyond the frame as forever spaces. Figures are laid bare — revealed to the histories that structure their environments. In sacred, private settings, they explore and reckon with partnership through innocent exchanges. Seeking innocence, a quality of perspective Morris felt denied to him after the murder of a close family member, is an act of reclamation for the artist. Play Too Much is an alarm, like a rooster’s crow come morning; you remember its reverberation but not always what day or event the sound announces. Nonetheless the call is dangerously present and effortlessly familiar each time you hear and at that moment, you know something must occur.

DEVIN N. MORRIS (b. 1986, Baltimore, Maryland) is a Brooklyn-based artist who works with mixed media paintings, photographs, writings and videos to depict real and imagined characters engaging in acts of kindness. He draws from his Baltimore upbringing and position as a black queer man to explore how personal experience, memory and space converge through these social exchanges. Morris is the founder of 3 Dot Zine, which recently launched a presentation for the 2018 New York Art Book Fair at MoMa PS1. 3 Dot Zine is a forum and publication for artists to address the concerns of marginalized communities and radically reimagine queer existence. Morris’s exhibitions include Inside Out Here, curated by Eric Booker at La Mama Gallery, New York; MOTHA and Chris E Vargas: Consciousness Razing – The Stonewall Re-memorialization Project at the New Museum, New York; and The Aesthetics of Matter, curated by Deux Femme Noires, a project of Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont.