​​Examining the physical and imaginary erosion occurring at Hanlan’s Point Beach on the Toronto Islands, fixed in place is a vessel for both solitary and communal experiences. Hanlan’s Point Beach was the site of Canada’s first ever Pride celebration in 1971. As an important gathering place for the city’s queer community, it is Canada’s oldest queer space and one of the oldest continuously queer spaces in the world. This project holds both joy and desire simultaneously, along with the grief and loss experienced in queer spaces through both personal and geological erosion.

fixed in place is a container for various chapters to exist simultaneously.

The works included in this project are:

infinite kiss, 16mm looped projection, 16mm film projectors

buried film, 30” x 96”, 16mm film altered by fire ants, sand, sun, humidity, water

iykyk, 2023, ink on paper, 11″ x 14″ each

a crease or a ripple, inkjet print on paper and wheat paste, 70″ x 50″

Proof 30: Otherwise Sensibilities, Gallery 44, Toronto, Ontario. June 7 – July 6, 2024

Referencing various media, places, and experiences, Proof 30: Otherwise Sensibilities artists Beau Gomez, Morgan Sears-Williams and Michaëlle Sergile extend an invitation to reflect. Childhood photographs, archival television clips and local geographies constitute points of departure from which the artists develop concepts through film photography, textile weaving, video and 16mm film. Considering the contemporary context of their referenced material, each artist encourages new understandings from the familiar, and explores the malleability of personal and political subjectivity—and how these subjectivities evolve through changing relationships to identity and culture. ‍

Works:

infinite kiss, 16mm looped projection, 16mm projectors

buried film, 34” x 96”, 16mm film altered by fire ants, sand, sun, humidity, water

Aqueous Nerve, UBC MFA Exhibition, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC. May 2 – June 3 2024

“The ways in which Morgan Sears-Williams makes films is categorically “improper”: she buries her film in the ground and into sand, she develops it in lavender, she scratches and makes marks onto it, and allows for vintage equipment to digest it and spit it out. Her works challenge the “masculinist fetishization of technical mastery” and the patriarchal standards of perfectionism and professionalism that plague the film industry. Instead, Sears-Williams allows audiences to see celluloid as a material object, something tangible and physical, rather than as something precious that cannot be handled. The very point of Sears-Williams’s aesthetics is its imperfection: the film grain, its harsh textures, its visible damage and erosion. For the artist, celluloid and 16 mm projectors are active agents and “co-conspirators” in the image-making process. By throwing out the “proper” and “authorized” ways to treat celluloid, as standardized in male-dominated commercial film, Sears-Williams instead aligns herself with the women and queer figures of “handmade cinema.” The term “handmade cinema” includes the hand-painting, manual editing and careful manipulations made to each frame that has traditionally been the domain of unsung feminine labour in the film industry.”

– Michael Dang.

Read the full commissioned essays here.

Works:

Solitarium, AHVA Gallery, University of British Columbia, September 18 – October 13, 2023

Positioning the structure of a solarium as a container for isolation, the artists in Solitarium consider contemporary human conditions through an incubation of loss, body, culture, and memory. A room which protects and isolates from outside elements, a solarium presents space as open to viewing the world yet shut off; preserving while secluding. A place to grow while accepting confinement. A place of comfort to let in the right amount of discomfort. An ‘in-between’ space. Conflating two disparate structures, Francisco Berlanga, Alex Gibson, Tiffany Law, Jesse Ross, and Morgan Sears-Williams explore states of solitude and growth as intertwined aspects of human life.

Together the artists in Solitarium question the lines between solitude and community, between the human desire to reach out, yet turn away. Through voluntary isolation, the body might find new avenues for growth, offering room to contemplate conflicting modes of resistance and receptivity which entwine to create psychological collisions. Much like heat from the sun intensified through an index of glass, so too might the act of self-concealment accelerate a way forward.

​​Examining the physical and imaginary erosion occurring at Hanlan’s Point Beach on the Toronto Islands, Morgan Sears-Williams’ work is a vessel for both solitary and communal experiences. Hanlan’s Point Beach was the site of Canada’s first ever Pride celebration in 1971. As an important gathering place for the city’s queer community, it is Canada’s oldest queer space, and one of the oldest continuously queer spaces in the world. The Solitarium holds both joy and desire simultaneously, along with the grief and loss experienced in queer spaces through both personal and geological erosion.

An infinite kiss in a concealed hideout you can only know about if you’re shown, sitting in a felt map, one that draws place as it’s experienced rather than cartographically. Emulsion eroding from acetate, stewing in sand dunes for days on end, morphed by the elements: sand, water, fire ants, wind, humidity, dirt. What remnants do we leave on the beach and what remnants of the beach remain on us?

Works:

infinite kiss, 16mm looped projection, 16mm projectors

iykyk, chalk drawing

iykyk, sound

buried film, 34” x 96”, 16mm film altered by fire ants, sand, sun, humidity, water