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.

Things aren’t always what they seem to be.

Using the fluidity and blurriness of oil paint on canvas, Morgan Ogilvie interrogates the real versus perceived world of “unreliable” female narrators, including Mia Farrow in the 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby. Her character believes her husband sold their firstborn to the devil to secure his success as an actor. Is she right or is she delusional? Ogilvie is interested in considering both possible truths simultaneously.

The artist also uses obsessive repetition to suggest that something is “off,” and danger lurks beyond the border of the painting. She paints wet into wet paint; each brushstroke disturbs the marks underneath. There is an intentional lack of control that is built into the way that she paints. Through this expressive approach she conveys a pervasive atmosphere of paranoia and dread which feels quite timely.