Devin N. Morris
Thank You For Being Here!
November 22, 2024 - January 18, 2025
CPM Gallery is thrilled to announce its exhibition of recent works by Devin N. Morris, entitled Thank You For Being Here!. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.
Through fictive reimaginings Devin N. Morris’s multidisciplinary art practice critically engages with systems of value and the tropes of domestic prosperity, as well as the social mores of race, sex, and sexuality. He creates works that combine painting, drawing, and photography with found objects, detritus, and ephemera discovered on daily walks through New York, Baltimore City and beyond. The material memory and emotional charge of these objects’ past lives, when activated within Morris’s complex arrangements, take on a linguistic character. Pieces of discarded clothing and furniture, moldings, liquor bottle caps, butterfly wings, plastic bags, and other objects become words, form sentences, and speak in image form.
The title of the exhibition, Thank You For Being Here!, is taken from the ubiquitous American grocery bag. Here, however, the word “Shopping” is replaced with “Being”—exchanging the energy of consumption with an exclamation of gratitude. This sentiment also refers to symbiotic transit : life to death, lost to found, truth to myth. This show, in large part, considers the monumentality of death, love, family legacy, and how our traversal of these planes generates the nutrients upon which the future grows.
The floor space of the gallery will display several 7ft tall freestanding works that incorporate collage, painting, assemblage, and mixed media, on substrates of USPS mail truck doors, which are repurposed as folding screens and picture frames, revealing familial scenes and material artifacts from the artist’s life. While he was growing up in Baltimore, Morris’s family had a contracting business with the United States Postal Service which has made these objects particularly sensitized. The walls of the gallery will display a group of large, curved and irregularly shaped works that improvise between personal and political environments, and surreal scenes of kinship between friends, family, and romantic partners.
Devin N. Morris was born in Baltimore, MD, in 1986 and currently lives and works in Harlem, New York. Recent exhibitions include: And Ever an Edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY(2023); Portrait of an Unlikely Space curated by Mickalene Thomas & Keely Orgeman, Yale Art Gallery, New Haven (2023); Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, Frist Museum, Nashville, (2023). Copy Machine Manifestos: Artist Who Make Zines, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2023); Kindred Worlds: The Priscila & Alvin Hudgins Collection, Hudson River Museum, NY(2023); Earthly Pleasures, Deli Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Minotaur's Daydream, Semiose, Paris (2023); Ways of Being, Collaborations, Copenhagen (2022); On Paper, Deli Gallery, New York (2021); and The Skin I Live In, Lyles and King, New York (2021).
Recent residencies: Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2023); Residencia São João, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (2022); ISCP Vision Fund Recipient, Brooklyn, NY(2021). Selected Bibliography: And Ever an Edge; Studio Museum Artists in Residence, New York Times, March 1(2024); For Devin N. Morris, Life's Roles Are Art and Inspiration, Cultured Magazine, July 12 (2023); Artist Devin Morris Creates Space to Explore Male Intimacy, Out Magazine, May 1(2019); Imperfect Tools for Navigation, The Brooklyn Rail, Feb 7 (2018).
No Rouge Stain Above the Door Will Do , 2024
Charred wood, house paint, acrylic, wood stain, threshold, lacquered chair leg, shattered side view mirror, ladder back chair, wrought iron fencing, willi smith slip dress, hair pin, steak knife, door knob, keys, keychains, wood siding, petrified hair brush, hanger, on wood panel
125 x 99 x 6.5 inches
8 Wings clapped for a name unknown, yet I search strenuously through all things that crack, shard, shirr, and disperse as sand, 2024
Oil, acrylic, watercolor, oil stick, oil pastel, spray paint, miniature bottle caps, lemongrass, thread, yarn, tree bark, whispers, color pencil, pastel, cinnamon bark, crayon confetti, resin, her immortalized flowers, pencil shavings, high grass drips, ink, collage, flowers, plywood, wood stain, Marcus Garvey Park, immersion, graphite, puzzle pieces, beads, fig leaf, metal wire, echoes, dried acrylic and oil mediums, matchsticks, flutters on paper on Euca board on wood on wall
49 3/4 × 80 1/2 × 27 inches
The end is the beginning at the end of a beginning that is bound to end, 2024
Oil pastel, acrylic, watercolor, pastel, gasoline, nail polish bottle, metal bottle top, broken glass, dangerous flowers, oil stick, acrylic rods, nails, oil, collage, nails, "thank you", "Here", steel birds, "thank you for", "I love freedom" on panel, on door
99.5 x 45 x 2.75 inches
My mother is the greatest artist. My mother is your mother, too. I weep, 2024
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, wood blocks, metal wire, keys, paper, collage, army patch, frayed bank cards, NY state insurance card, pearls, playing cards, plastic comb, broken ceramic vessel, "house by house", ebt card, her flowers, resin, netting, curling ribbon, rope trim, lanyard (gimp), shoulder pads, "D", remnants of dollar bills, iron candle holder, deflated balloons, Die, dominoes, ribbon bow, water color, puzzle pieces, halved side table, glass vase, nails on USPS truck folding door
90.25 x 28 x 7 inches
My mother is the greatest artist. My mother is your mother, too. I weep, 2024 (back of sculpture)
and sometimes Y, 2024
“A E I O U”, color pencil, willi smith dress, oil pastel, collage, carpets, oil stick, graphite, miniature liquor bottle top, acrylic, oil, vinyl sticker, curling ribbon, wood veneer, wooden frame, plastic bag, “&”, ribbon, spiral wrist coil, charcoal on USPS folding truck door
90.25 x 28 x 7 inches
Threshold (Suspended in the Between, Through and Over), 2024
Resin, her flowers, ribbon, gold watch, earrings, deflated balloons, wood earring, ground cds, curling ribbon, collage, dice, pigment powder, her bracelets, ribbon, faux flowers, crayon confetti, beaded bracelet, bows, pailletes, broken pencil, portal, metal bird, hair clip, Corelle plate, suspended in the round
40 inches diameter
Wreath, 2024
Her flowers, candle wax, resin, wreath bows, love, wreath holder
60 x 35.5 x 24 inches
Petty Change, 2024
The break, oil pastel, lottery tickets, collage, oil stick, acrylic, tempera, graphite, charcoal, color pencil, wood veneer, corbels, roofing shingles, tongue and groove wood panel, bike seat, spray paint, fabric bows, "petty change", chair legs, tongue and groove wood wall panel, pastel, butter knife, spoon, seconds hand, moldings, photo frame, wood dowel on USPS truck folding door
90.25 x 50 x 11 inches
No Place for Haints, 2024
Oil pastel, wood veneer, charcoal, acrylic, house paint, oil, NY Yankees hat, Maria D's, felt, color pencil, Federal Hill, Harlem, takeout cups, advertising poster, "One Way" vinyl sticker, pencil shavings, cashed matches, spray paint, paint skins, collage, graphite, yarn, lemongrass, screen door, cabinet door, toys, Haint Blue on canvas
80 x 63 x 25 inches
Thank You For Being Here (Dress), 2024
Reusable shopping bags, spray paint, color pencil, metal hanger, thread
63.25 x 24 inches
The clovers' in the Crack’s, 2024
Wood veneer, oil pastel, color pencil, litho ink monotype, moldings on paper, on wood floor panel
26 x 18.5 x 1.75 inches