Morgan Ogilvie received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and is currently on the Alumnx council for 2021 (though she resides in Franklin, Tennessee). She has work at Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment in Beverly Hills, CA. Her paintings have been published in the 2020 issue of the Vassar Review themed “Protest, Prophecy, Play”. Her work has been selected to be published in the first of a three-part edition book series Art in the Time of Corona written by DAB Art Company founder, Yessica Torres. This past summer her work was shown in Artforum and she participated in and helped organize the group show, Time is Out of Joint, published in Hyperallergic, held at the MAK Center in LA, and curated by artist and composer Scott Benzel. Her work has been published in The Tennessean and featured in Nashville Arts Magazine, and the Nashville Scene. She was in the group show, Keep it Warm, at Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville, TN. She has been honored to be in a group exhibition, Living the Archive, with the distinguished artist, writer, member of the Pictures Generation, and famous defender of figurative painting in the 1970s, Thomas Lawson, who was also her mentor.

Often looking at the world through the lens of misunderstood female characters, I consider themes such as childhood wonderment, pathology, family lineage, absurdity, Southern Gothic, all tinged with an unapologetically feminine aesthetic.

I construct a stage full of anti-heroines, fictional and historical, whom I do not rescue. Instead, I place the audience in the vulnerable position of these women: what might it feel like to be in their shoes? Furthermore, I cast difficult figures—such as Rosemary Woodhouse, Typhoid Mary, and Martha Mitchell*—as unlikely protagonists, or at least place them in a position to be reconsidered.

There is often a suggestion of danger that takes place beyond the border of the painting. This causes the viewer to question what they think they know about historical events or fictional stories. I generally do not show aggression or explosive conflict—it is often implied, about to happen, or has already happened. The action largely resides outside the edges of the canvas. I am interested in capturing the indexical traces or anticipation of conflict and disintegration, allowing for new ways of knowing these archetypal figures.

*Martha Mitchell—wife of the attorney general under the Nixon administration, John N. Mitchell, who was caught up in Watergate and slandered and framed as a quintessential unreliable narrator