Brandon Morris knows a thing or two about conjuring uneasiness. With Actress, his most recent exhibition at Europa Gallery, the New York-based artist presents a series of spectral dresses, each of which lacks a body to occupy it.
Morris, having studied and practiced the craft of dressmaking, displays an impressive command over the fabric with which he works. Rather than billowing gracefully, the dresses featured in Actress stand rigidly, every fold, wrinkle, and curve stiffened into stillness. The garments also possess a strange and almost haunting translucency, emitting a green glow reminiscent of a ghost’s. What makes these dresses all the more uncanny is the fact that no one is wearing them: they simply float, frozen and suspended, within the gallery.
The effect is one of discomfort, but it’s also indicative of Morris’s dexterity. To accomplish these forms, Morris adapted vintage Victorian children’s gowns, generating new patterns that he then sewed with fiberglass through an industrial sewing machine. Afterward, he leaned, slumped, and braced his garments with a temporary internal mannequin while stiffening the cloth with green resin. Once hardened and removed from the mannequins, the dresses appear hollow, devoid of any substance other than a faint suggestion of a past life.
When approaching these dresses, we’re forced to confront their emptiness. Who—or what—did these dresses once hold? Where have they gone, and what happened to them? Morris’s dresses contain these questions and the anxieties they may provoke.
Given their eeriness, it’s unsurprising that Morris was inspired by the 1998 Japanese horror movie Ring. Sadako, the film’s primary antagonist and vengeful ghost, often appears on-screen with her back hunched, her body rigid inside her dress. It’s an image that, according to Morris, has stuck with him and one that guided him as he created the Actress installation.
“We find murmurs of flesh without a body,” Europa Gallery writes. “These dresses evoke not life but its residues.”
To discover more of the artist’s work, follow Brandon Morris on Instagram.
Actress, artist Brandon Morris’s most recent solo exhibition at Europa Gallery, featured dresses without bodies to occupy them.
Morris adapted vintage Victorian children’s gowns, generating new patterns that he then sewed with fiberglass and stiffened using green resin.
The resulting garments possess a haunting translucency, emitting a ghostly green glow.
When approaching these dresses, we’re forced to confront their emptiness. Who—or what—did these dresses once hold?
