Morgan Platts: <Inter/Dependent>

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Morgan Platts, "Reaching Out of the Void," 2022

digital collage. Courtesy of the artist.

Morgan Platts: <Inter/Dependent>

By merging the phrases “interdependent” and “internet dependent”, Morgan Platts’ exhibition of collages, sound installation, and a zine reflect on an accelerating intimacy with digital devices. For Platts, internet dependence has been a double-edged sword. Relying on apps for entertainment and communication has become essential in times of isolation but starts to replace intrinsically human experiences.

Platts’ collages and her interactive sound installation recall how personal devices have become an extension of our bodies, fingers, and even the emotional amygdala. Collages combining virtual matrices, disembodied arms and heads, and cues from user interfaces of operating systems past, describe a recent period where virtual escape, touch, isolation, joy, and distress comingle. Her interactive installation using conductive paint requires the touch of a user to complete the circuit, using the body as a conduit, a necessary addition to complete the machine. Rewarding touch with sounds familiar to anyone who has mindlessly scrolled TikTok, Platts considers how touch and its psychological rewards rarely exist without a mechanical intermediary.

<inter/dependent> describes an increasing dependence on machines for cognitive, aesthetic, and psychological needs while infiltrating our most private moments. As Donna Haraway writes in “A Cyborg Manifesto”, “…we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism – in short, cyborgs.” Although playful and interactive, Platts’ exhibition describes the accelerated and communal experience of becoming a cyborg.

SAAG Art Library Project: Begun in 2020, the Gallery presents exhibitions as in-situ interventions within our Art Library. The Art Library Project features a diverse selection of artworks and mediums from regional contemporary artists. Artists are invited to think of the library as a unique exhibition context by investigating the Gallery’s programming around readership, publications, and its place within Lethbridge’s historic Carnegie library which opened in 1922. Artists are encouraged to consider the physical architecture of the library and its material holdings, responding to a broader and generative idea of what a library might be, as they change and adapt to new forms of knowledge production.

Morgan Platts is an interdisciplinary artist living, working, and playing in Mohkinstsis on Treaty 7 (colonially Calgary, Alberta). She graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Alberta University of the Arts and is currently in the process of completing her B.Ed from the University of Calgary. Playing with ideas surrounding old vs. new, cut and paste, and digital vs. physical, Morgan’s practice expresses the idea that the digital landscape we have formed around us is a fleeting, yet simultaneously persistent space that is ever changing. Through her use of mixed media and reference to digital iconography, her work aims to make the digital tangible.

This exhibition was made possible with funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Lethbridge.

Curated by Adam Whitford, Interim Curator