MATT MORRIS

i’m issue; i’m free

PEREGRINEPROGRAM

May 2014

“I shall always push through curtains to privacy, 
and want some whispered words alone.”[1]

For the past seven months, my studio and library have shared a space. This renders physical the impure quality of my various art activities. My making, writing, and modes of platforming[2] spring into being as interrelated parts; I don’t wish to obfuscate my deep feelings about art history nor the hope I harbor for ways that community can form. This work is intimately entangled with the apparatuses by which my practice is constituted, but also those that I elect to help construct. I’m endlessly curious about what of significance might be apprehended among several positions or along their margins. 

To traverse these braided pathways—these crisscrossed lines of desire and orientation—I felt that I needed to build a time machine, and so I sewed a pillow. I ravished a piece of velvet with my teeth to get a feeling for a painting Jasper Johns made after he and Rauschenberg broke up.[3] Appropriative gestures in painting became utterly sincere ones. I arranged a private liaison with Jon, one of the sweet people who run peregrineprogram, and hope to tell you more about that after the fact. My mom said, all too eagerly, “At least you’re on the game board!”[4]

[1] Virginia Woolf. The Waves. Ware, Hertforshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2000.

[2] This exhibition coincides with one I’ve curated for the Hills Esthetic Center (128 N Campbell Ave, Chicago, IL 60612). Miss Kilman and She Were Terrible Together opens on the evening of May 9th and continues through June 6th.

[3] Jasper Johns, Painting Bitten by a Man, 1961. Encaustic on canvas mounted on type plate, 9 1/2 x 6 7/8”. Museum of Modern Art.

[4] Clue: The Great Museum Caper. Parker Brothers, 1991.