PROSOPOGRAPHIE
Biography (2011-Current)
My prosopography takes the form of a short collection of descriptive texts from my art career.
ABC MYTHOLOGIES
Gallery 345 (December 2011)
My first solo show after completing my BFA, building on my undergraduate thesis, ABC Mythologies reimagines Classical stories, heroes and gods as contemporary alienated young artists. A series of twenty-four paintings (corresponding to the letters of the Greek alphabet), including a monumental folding screen which displayed Xanthus and Patroclus on alternate panels, was exhibited with companion sculptures, such as for Jason and the Dragon Tooth Warriors where I hand silkscreened a hundred t-shirts with “Dragon Teeth Boys”, that were distributed to the visitors.
EMERALD CITY
GALLERY 809 (MARCH 2012)
During a three-week residency in Calgary at EIGHTONINE gallery, I hand-crafted a limited run of custom 3D glasses corresponding to panels done in red and green, playing with colour theory and optics. These paintings floated above the picture plane, the 3D effect blending flat land with our own visual acuity. The show created a fictional fascist state “Emerald City” drawing imagery from archival youth brigades, where I dictated the lens of viewership, blurring the line between idyllic and authoritative.
SUPRAVIOLET EMANATIONS
The Fountain Gallery (September 2012)
In researching colour theory, I was intrigued by the difficulty presented to digital sensors in seeing, rendering, and processing purples, specifically non-photogenic violet and blue. There is a processional or ceremonial ordering to the paintings, the composition flowing between each of the series if they are juxtaposed correctly. Violet is an elusive colour to produce, both in its manufacturing as well as in renderings. This series highlighted its agitative property and also the difficulty in reproducing faithfully the paintings in digital format.
DAS CLERBHAUS
Don Blanche (August 2013)
Don Miller and Christine Swintak have created a notable artists’ retreat at Don’s rural Ontario property where artists are given a safe haven outside the city where cross-disciplinary experimentation and differences are celebrated. Along with some thirty-six other artists, I shared communal meals, did heavy lifting (helping to move a barn), and art talk. I hosted a radio show, and along with two other artists created a club house in the back woods, where I led a high ceremonial magic initiation ritual for the community. I kept a field journal with notes, sketches and thoughts.
FOXHOLE
WreckCity (March-April 2013)
In the spring of 2013, a collective of Calgarian curators, all associated with the alternative Calgary art scene, persuaded developers to allow them to have free reign over a city block of tract houses slated for demolition. As one of some hundred artists, I took over a semi-basement space and created an entrance via a narrow ladder from the floor above. The entrance suggested a foxhole, complete with sandbags, while the room below was transformed into a den, part goth teenager, part drug den, part séance space, filled with fluorescent-painted artifacts, which I re-purposed from the abandoned items left in the houses.
TROLLKUNST
multi-site performance practice (December 2014+ )
An ongoing, noise-based experimental music project, Trollkunst plays on notions of the collective/hybrid identity, forming uncomfortable interactions with its viewing public--something brutish or ugly that forms connectivity, both live and virtually. Forming this hyperidentity is a type of strategy that reflects poorly on knowledge gained in art school. Part troll-doll, part angry troller of the internet, part wounded animal, in my role as troll, I create temporary structures, soundscapes, video, light projections, in ritualistic performances as well as in documentation/still imagery and a mound of detritus.
HOMER’S ODYSSEY
Videofag (September 2014)
For “Homer’s Odyssey, A Simpson Show” curated by Jimmy Cahill at Videofag, I created a limited edition set of thirteen distinct, tradeable playing cards, which the public was invited to trade, as each set contained a random duplication. The theme of the exhibition was the iconic cartoon show, “The Simpsons”. The images on these cards played transgressively with the characters and affectual lives. Along with the curator, I was also interviewed by Xtra! Magazine, a Queer-focused publication.
GHOSTHOLE
Artscape Gibraltor Point (Halloween 2011-14)
Ghost Hole is a one-night-only pan-arts event happening on, and themed around, Halloween. An artistic take on the haunted house, it occupies opportunistic venues. Resulting in an art variety show, a large group of artists, from neophytes to established figures, are invited to occupy the space to create works specifically for the event. I have participated in four of the seven Ghost Hole iterations as collaborating artist, facilitator, residency assistant, bartender and assistant curator. I had the opportunity to do residencies and complete installations for Ghost Hole IV and Ghost Hole V, hosted at Artscape Gibraltor (sic) Point, a de-listed schoolhouse now functioning as studio spaces. For my piece “Psychomanteum” (Ghost Hole IV, 2012) I built an apparition booth, featuring a large mirror, black walls, a droning sound and weak flickering light. By gazing into the reflective surface, a Ganzfeld effect is produced. This installation referenced ancient oracular sites, Victorian spiritualism, and 1930s psychological experimentation. For “Phantom Lights” (Ghost Hole V, 2013), I created a monolithic black portal outlined in light, fog and sound. Viewers approaching the installation were overwhelmed by the contrast between the brightly illuminated frame and the unguageable depth of the black chamber. Sitting within the chamber, they became invisible to those outside, who were in turn theatrically lit. This doubled optical effect is unsettling because it plays with both our sense perception (that which is physical and apparent to our eyes) as well as the extraordinary (what could be just hallucinations). https://ghosthole4.wordpress.com/about/res-artist-morris-fox/
ROUNDTABLE RESIDENCY
Dragon Academy (Summer 2013-20)
I co-founded an experimental emerging artists’ studio residency in 2013, The Roundtable Residency. The primary goal of the residency is to assist artists in the development of their practice, and to facilitate collaborations among artists and other practitioners with disparate methodologies and experiences. To this end the residency provides workspace at no cost; critiques and constructive feedback from members of the arts community in Toronto; workshops and other skill/community-building events; and unique peer-to-peer mentorship opportunities.
SHIT+TALK
Long Winter TO (March 2015)
For Long Winter, a recurring interarts festival at The Great Hall, a reclaimed Victorian performance venue, Lucy Satzewich first peppered the women’s washroom with paper, inviting the public to scrawl bathroom messages. She then invited artists to respond to particular messages as they desired. I created a four foot by ten foot word art banner “RUNAWAY GOTH” in a transmogrified political street style, which was included in the group show.
PALE BLUE
Milk Glass Co. (Summer 2015)
As part of a three pronged curation mounted at Milk Glass Co., Jimmy Cahill, the curator, launched the publication “Pale Blue” including written and visual content, as well as a corresponding “mixtape”; for the launch, they created an exhibition that invited the artists to create works and performances relating to the theme of Cosmos. The publication included a spread of my work as redacted confidential files containing twelve poems in the format of popular daily astrology horoscopes; I created a spacey sound piece for the mixtape; I performed in the role of Alien Astrologer, provocatively predicting audience members’ futures.
EXPLORING THE NECROPASTORAL
Pith Studios (Fall 2015)
I used the opportunity of a non-curated studio as an artist’s retreat in Calgary to produce a body of work as a form of creative research. I sourced material from wrecks of cargo trucks on Alberta mountain highways, burnt logs collected from forest fire sites in British Columbia, and I used medical supplies, and included olfactory components as well as sound to create an immersive sensory atmosphere, more séance than installation or gallery show. I could completely transform the gallery space, which was slated to be torn down and replaced with a soulless condo bloc. The gallery had functioned as cheap studio space for emerging artists for a number of years, an integral part of Calgary’s pop-up/DIY scene. As my project the last one housed in this gallery, and my show was its swan song, it was particularly fitting given the thematic content of my work—the Necropastoral.
MFA Low Residency
SAIC, Chicago, (2016-2018)
Representation Matters
Main Street Museum, VT (Fall 2016)
So Goth, So Gone
In the Fold, Group Show, Throop Studio, Chicago, (Summer 2017)
Making Out
SITE Gallery, Chicago, (Summer 2017)
MFA Thesis Show
Low Residency MFA, SAIC, Sullivan Galleries (2018)
Velvet Fields
Marin Gallery, Waterloo Iowa (Spring 2019)
Residencies: Iceland
Icelandic Textile Centre, Blondous and Nes, Skagastrond (April-June 2019)
Archive of Feeling
Chandler Street Gallery (Fall 2019)
Textile Intern
Icelandic Textile Centre, Blondous (March-May 2020)
“…what best reveals [plastic] for what it is is the sound it gives, at once hollow and flat; its noise is its undoing, as are its colours, for it seems capable of retaining only the most chemical-looking ones. Of yellow, red and green, it keeps only the aggressive quality, and uses them as mere names, being able to display only concepts of colours.”
—Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Gothwerk
Hot Wheelz Festival (Fall 2020)
“Gothwerk is a project that lives in a cultural and environmental moment of reckoning. The artists involved share practices with an affinity towards the existential and straight-up goth orientation with a libratory flare. I am invested in questioning what constitutes belonging based on the identification of affinity or love in my work. So what does it feel like to have a relationship with ghosts, deep time, or the new wave of baroque goth clubs, virtual realities, latex, and lace? “—Maggie Wong