Cane Queen, 2016, digital photograph. From the series Soil.
Courtney Desiree Morris
Artist Statement
My work examines the complexities of place, ecology, memory, and the constant search for “home.” Specifically, I am interested in understanding the ways that we inhabit place – through migration, ancestry, and shared social memory -- and how place inhabit us. This interplay between landscapes and human subjectivity is evident in the ways that I use my own body as a staging ground for remembering my families’ experiences of loss, dispossession, and the persistent struggle to make a place for oneself in the world. I am particularly interested in examining these questions through the experiences of female ancestors and elders whose stories are often disappeared in both family histories and official historical narratives of how places, economies, and histories are made.
I am trained as a social anthropologist and my research and art focus specifically on social movements and cultural politics in the African Diaspora. This ethnographic sensibility pervades my work, which blurs the boundaries between documentary and aesthetic practice. My creative work is primarily preoccupied with questions of migration, dispossession, diasporic spiritual traditions, ritual aesthetics, and social memory. I conceptualize my art practice as an ethnographic ritual practice that recovers the submerged histories of diasporic populations in small places that are widely considered to be marginal social actors in the formation of the West. The practice of ancestor veneration is central to this work, and I incorporate ancestral rituals and traditions from Jamaica, the US Gulf South, and West Africa.
I work primarily in the fields of large-format portrait and landscape photography, experimental video, and performance art and social practice. I am drawn to these mediums because of the ways that they allow me to engage and play with history by performatively inhabiting subjects from the past imaginatively filling in the gaps where “facts” are either unknown or in dispute. Photography and video are critical tools for providing viewers with a deep sense of place and historicity. Alternatively, performance functions as a kind of time-traveling technology where I can revisit and restage sites of ancestral memory, interrogate the present, and imagine new kinds of social and ecological futures.