ava morton
class of 2020
about
Ava Morton is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from in Houston, Texas. She received a BA in Fine arts and a BA in Biological-Anthropology from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Morton’s writing and artistic practices are entwined and often focus on (re)contextualization, subversion, and affect. Her most recent research takes a particular interest in linguistics, sound and the boundaries of the body. Her studio practice employs the tactics of drawing in space, to build loosely figurative sculptures and videos. Morton is currently dual degree candidate in the Masters of Fine Arts program and the Visual and Critical Studies program at California College of the Arts.
Thesis
The Unkempt “Uh”
The Unkempt “Uh” explores the potentialities of the utterance “Uh” in Nikita Gale’s multimedia installation Uh Landscape (2014). In Uh Landscape, electronic devices vibrate and emit sound. A text-based video is projected on the wall above. Another video plays disorienting and apocalyptic found footage of American landscapes. The aural interruption of “Uh” is heard throughout the installation: a linguistic signifier that marks a speaker’s audible moment of hesitation and doubt. Gale’s installation centers on the value of this disruptive utterance: the form of “uh” becomes a strategy for feminist and postcolonial challenges to perfection and essentialization. “Uh” is read through notions of the interval framed by Trinh T. Minh-Ha and as a gesture towards opacity as framed by Édouard Glissant. “Uh” disorients, opening up a void with infinite potential to remake the self; it is both empty and full, always in a state of potential energy. Uh Landscape employs this utterance to challenge and disorient dominant ideologies of nature and women, reevaluating “Uh” as a disruptive force that derives power through its paradoxically insecure, indeterminate, and disorienting qualities.
