DESIRE
Project 304, Bangkok
11th September - 10th October 1999
Susan Morris’ work questions populist-oriented media by actively avoiding subjects that facilitate sensation in her exploration of a series of connected and disconnected juxtapositions of desire – after all, there’s nothing sensational about watching a road junction, or viewing slowly scrolling text pieces in our age of hypermedia, multimedia, and the fetish of interactivity.
Morris selects ordinary subjects from the urban London landscape and makes them extraordinary with her carefully selected compositions and hypnotic voyeuristic frames. Her subject matter comes from everyday experiences and combines ‘slice-of-life’ with manipulative staging. She references the increasing role of video surveillance within city life and the possibly related obsession with public and private life distinctions, and makes viewers question their own voyeuristic desires. Morris actively catches out the viewer by maintaining visual distance while simultaneously mesmerising them with her frozen frames, emphasizing distanced visual connections and cool disconnections.
What is Desire? The desire to know, to examine, to interact, and possibly to be entertained by and/or control? Morris plays with these desires with detachment, open-ended narratives, and a sensibility that demonstrates that, despite the drive for technological advancement, we still cannot get beneath the surface of things, or that the surfaces have shifted. The distance is never overcome, it is perhaps impenetrable.
Sensation provides immediate gratification, but desire remains.
Robert Preece
Independent Curator, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Susan Morris works with video and computer. Her interests are in how technology, in structuring time, provides both frame and screen to organise desire within the image. She Is currently researching this theme for a PhD, as a bursary fellow at Goldsmiths' College, University of London.
Her most recent solo show was Between Hits at accident, October 1997. Recent group shows include Interior/Interior, Silent Movies, What is a Photograph? and Accident. She has a forthcoming solo show at Five Years Gallery (January 2000).
