Morgan Markey

Steven Wright Impression — Research-based performance exploring how it would feel for a mixed-race woman to embody the monologue and performance of a middle-aged white male comic. In this video-based work, I impersonate Steven Wright, a comic from the late eighties, who uses quick and dry one liners to incite roars of laughter. I attempt to do the same, in identical fashion, but with my own set of jokes, only to receive crickets in response. This was an exploratory exercise to question how audiences receive and respond to jokes differently based on the identity individual.

What Colour Are You ? — “What Colour Are You?”, takes inspiration from female contemporary artists’ Carrie Mae Weem’s “Kitchen Table Series” and Martha Rosler’s “Semiotics of The Kitchen”. I reinterpret and recreate their works by creating a new version as it relates to me. During the reinterpretation process I was able to extract similar themes while breathing into them, a new voice. In “What Colour Are You” I fill in ethnicity surveys with black and white paint where the boxes indicate that I must either choose the black box or white box to identify myself. These videos are a commentary on my experience as a mixed-race person. The videos mock the idea of labelling the colour of someone’s skin by its actual colour, and in such binary terms. The photographs and video highlight our inability to label people of various origins – where our descriptors typically have little to no relationship to the individual’s actual background. The underlying humour in these works highlight the institutional racism that has laid down the framework for how we label and categorise people.