Untitled
18” x 24"
digital print on Canson Infinity PhotoSatin Premium RC (270gsm)
Edition of 25
2017
Derrick Woods-Morrow utilizes childhood narratives to connect past experiences of growing up in the American South with present methods of envisioning ‘playfulness’ & ‘restoration’ as necessary considerations for seeing bodies, like and unlike his own, renewed. His work explores an array of Eastern & Gulf Coast historical narratives, celebrating, and archiving interactions between, bodies, ideologies & their connection to the land. Through fluidly choreographed movement black queer bodies ‘inhabit’ his work, developing methods for experiencing a new American terrain, one that is playful and forgiving.
Key inspirations such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin & Audre Lorde become central to the work, as their writings and recordings center blackness as freely existing within itself, and inherently queer. For Derrick, The careful interpretation of their poetry and prose is a necessary means of decentralizing contemporary racial structures and influences the types of images he produces.
Derrick holds a heavy preoccupation with black sexual freedoms and the complicated histories concerning this freedom. Central to his imagination are dialogues that demand inhabitants give agency and historical specificity to the black and queer subjects, themes and motifs within his practice. Throughout his process he asks what it would mean to imagine a past or a future for bodies like his own exist as ‘whole’ to not perpetually labor merely in order to exist but to thrive and play.