Radical Comfort

“I see a lot of films as a kind of a projection of a hopeful and wonderful world. To be able to show trans bodies existing in a loving way.”

– Amelia Morrison

I met Amelia a year ago as a classmate while taking a History of Social Practice class at Portland State University. Our friendship didn’t come to fruition until much later in the year, when we were classmates studying abroad in Italy. Soon after arriving, we realized we had both brought a paper copy of Hito Steryl’s Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War.

 A unique choice for plane literature. It was then that I knew our fate as friends was sealed.

Our friendship continues to be fueled by emailing each other PDFs of our favorite essays and gossipping about whether the mysterious Claire Fontaine is leaving one star Yelp reviews in Portland. I’m deeply inspired by how Amelia voraciously reads, watches, and experiences the world around them. Through these diligent studies, Amelia extracts their unique vision for creating their liberatory work. For this interview I took time to chat more with them about their influences, pursuits of scholarly research, and the power of feminist film and image making. 

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Nina Vichayapai: So, I had an Amelia watch party thanks to your YouTube channel and it was wonderful. Could you start by talking a little bit about your practice and how it formed?

Amelia Morrison:  I got into video making in 2018, 2019, because I was connecting with a lot of people’s stories through their vlogs. And, this is kind of corny, but I wanted to become a vlogger. I thought it was maybe a way to make money. But I also wanted to participate in this online community of people who were sharing stories. It felt very futuristic to me and it still does. An online community of people who share their lives with one another and then have the ability to travel to different places through video. I wanted to participate in that, but I also found that vlogging was really hard for me. Talking to a camera felt uncomfortable. But I have been collecting clips of things for a long time. 

It wasn’t really until I got to Portland State University that I started to really invest in myself as an artist and try and discover what medium I wanted to focus on. There, I started to take my photography and video work really seriously. 

Nina: Was there a specific moment, class, or professor that was part of shaping that path into video art for you? 

Amelia: I took Intro to Video Art with Julie Perini and made some pieces that I was really proud of. Working with Julie also has helped me connect some experiences I had in 2020 related to protesting police violence and violence against black people in the United States. Through that, I started realizing that putting your body in front of a line of police officers as a way to protest these things wasn’t necessarily going to be a sustainable way to fight against police violence. 

Making videos started to feel like the most effective way that I could be using my time and energy. I was taking a lot of video footage at that time. And I think a lot of people were experiencing this realization of how powerful it was to take pictures and film the protests, to document what was happening.

Getting to work with Julie, who also has worked in documenting police violence in Portland, was really inspiring to me. Before I returned back to school after taking a long break, a big part of my reasoning was wanting to become a more effective activist but feeling like I didn’t have the right toolkit to do that. So I wanted to go back to school and get those tools, but I didn’t really know what exactly I wanted to focus on when I started. But with video art, things just started to flow.

Nina: I’m curious about what you choose to film. Along with the work you’ve done on protests, there’s a lot of videos of your friends and loved ones captured in a tender moment, or having intimate conversations. What do you look for in deciding to film something and what is it like to have your subjects be the people around you?

Amelia: I look for deep comfort in my work and I want to feel real consent from the people around me. Like, during some of the times we were together on our trip in Italy I was like, “oh, I’m sorry I’m filming so much.” And you just go, “it’s part of your project.” That sense of understanding and support is what I look for and makes me feel like it’s a good moment to film. 

But this also means that sometimes I feel kind of limited with what I can do. Things don’t happen for a long time. You’re building a relationship and building trust. That was a big part of the film, In Images, that I made, which was really about celebrating these queer relationships that I have.

As I get older, as a queer person, it’s really hard to find the kind of community that I imagined for myself. I felt like I and the people I love were all experiencing some really deep feelings of loneliness and isolation when I made In Images. So I wanted to document those relationships because they felt very precious.

Nina: While I was watching In Images I was thinking about how vulnerable it was to be seeing Sam Wrigglesworth the photographer take a photo of someone else while they were nude. So both the subject and photographer were nude. It’s pretty contradictory to the typical photographer subject relationships you see, where only the subject would be nude. That shared experience of vulnerability and intimacy seems pretty rare. You show your queer community in a really respectful way that resists voyeurism which I really admire.

I know you’re deeply inspired by the people you’re close to, like Sam or Julie, but I’m wondering where else you’re drawing from when you make your films. Could you talk about some of your influences and research? 

Amelia: Sam Wrigglesworth has been a big inspiration to me. Sam is a teacher and is receiving the Tee Corrine Fellowship at Ohio State University. Tee Corrine is a famous lesbian photographer and poet. She participated in lesbian separatist communities in southern Oregon and started a workshop called the Ovulars. The focus was to put cameras in the hands of lesbians and have them photograph each other. A really beautiful book of the Ovulars came out of that called Notes on Fundamental Joy, by Carmen Winot.

So Sam has done a lot of research on the Ovulars and is directly inspired by the work of Tee Corrine, which I’m also really inspired by. 

The whole idea was about women taking photos of each other while they were all naked. Not necessarily all the time. It dealt with concepts of power and who is in front of the camera and who’s behind the camera, and also documenting things in many layers where the camera becomes a part of the photograph and you see nudity on both sides, but it’s really more than nudity. It’s about sharing vulnerability as a photographic project. Both Sam and I have been really inspired by that idea. And this idea of having a friendship that is documented in a way that is loving.

The more I started to read about the idea of the apparatus, the camera as an apparatus, and the oppositional gaze in movies, I started to really see how interesting and intellectual the work of people like Tee Corrine is. Which is kind of interesting because I think as a human, as a queer person who is assigned a female gender, those things are obvious. When you’re not in an intellectual setting, it feels obvious that we should take photos of each other and have it be in this safe way based on sharing. But I think the more you study the history of cinema and photography, the more you realize how powerful and important that safety and consent is. 

Through understanding the history I see that it’s much more radical than I realized when I was living it. 

Nina: I know you want to pursue a PhD and do research. How does art and research come together in your practice? There’s an intensity to how you engage with both of those things and it seems like you’re equally invested in both. 

Amelia: I would like to do both. I think for me right now, the emphasis on research comes from a real desire to want to understand academic conversations and engage with them on a certain level with basic ideas that feel inherent to what I already know or have always known. I want to beable to discuss those concepts in a way that is reinforced by some kind of intellectual understanding. I have a lot of ideas about intersectional feminism and queer culture and the way that we can change society through images and also through living in certain types of communities.

I’m inspired to continue to do research because I would like to learn what people have said before and also go beyond that. 

Like obviously, I’m really excited by some of those concepts. And when you read about it, you can go more deeply into them, and that seems like a liberatory practice right now, because it feels like an opportunity to break out of some of the entrenched stereotypes and societal ideologies that live in your mind.

Nina: Do you feel a need to make art from the research? 

Amelia: I’m always going to be an artist. I don’t really question if I’ll be an artist or continue making art because it’s inherent to the way I live my life and process my emotions and feel good about myself.

In research I really just want to know more about these topics because it feels like we’re under attack. I didn’t grow up feeling like I was a queer person under attack and now I really do. Part of that is understanding myself as a trans person and seeing that just because our nation accepts gay marriage, that isn’t equivalent to other issues like trans liberation. And understanding that globally, homophobia is being used more and more as a tool for nationalist political parties.

We’re going to need to continue to struggle. And political struggle looks different for everyone. For me, studying queer histories and feminist concepts feels like a way that I can continue to fight.

Nina: It’s interesting to me that fighting those issues can happen through contributing to research but also through art making for you. I think that is why a lot of artists make art, though. Because they have a hopeful vision and want to manifest something that they see. 

Amelia: I see a lot of films as a kind of a projection of a more hopeful and wonderful world. To be able to show trans and other marginalized bodies existing in a loving way. That’s a concept from a lot of black feminist film theory that I’m inspired by as well, like Julie Dash’s 1991 film Daughters of the Dust or Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman. There’s such a power to those films. That’s how I feel about the Ovulars as well. I just think about how it’s actually so rare to see all these naked lesbians taking photos of each other. And having seen them, the images are in me, making me feel more connected to myself somehow.

I would like to continue contributing to those kinds of hopeful images based on things that I’ve experienced. 

Nina: So what are some things you’re hoping to do next?

Amelia: This year I’m trying to make work that starts from a place of feeling. I have a lot of space to work on my BFA project. So instead of starting with a more intellectual or political concept, I want to use that space to follow what feels best. Which is a way of artmaking that I think I use a lot more for projects outside of school.

When you’re in an art program there’s a lot of focus on production. But I’m trying to take the time to feel my way through my next project. So I’m working on a series of photographs that will hopefully lead me into a larger image based project like a photo book or film.

A question that is guiding my work right now is, “what are the liberatory potentials for images that are made by people outside the dominant narrative? How are these images different from the plastic representations that are typically seen?” 

And so for my personal artistic work I’m asking what the world looks like from my perspective. I’m finding that in a lot of the work that I’ve shared, people have read feelings of grief. I’m exploring why that might be and what that might say about my perspective and the way I experience the world. I’m realizing that trauma impacts the way that I see the world.

So I’m working on a series of portraits and a lot of the portraits are obscured in some way, which is becoming more intentional but wasn’t always. So I’m thinking about how relationships can be obscured by trauma. 

I’m also thinking about my own experiences with reproductive trauma. It’s not something that I’ve talked a lot about in my art work but it’s coming from a place of personal experience.

A lot of my work, I think, will always be political, since that’s such a part of the way I live my life and the way that I put myself in the world. So I’m trying to make space in this work to find the political meaning later.

Beyond this project, I’m hoping to display my work more after I graduate and apply to grad school.

Nina: That idea of allowing the work to find political meaning naturally is really interesting. I’ve also been thinking a lot about resisting the urge to force political meaning in my work. It can be really exhausting especially as a person of color to live with that pressure. Learning to trust instead that politics will be evident in the work you do and is evident across the whole body of what you do, because it’s a part of your life, has been really freeing.

Amelia: I agree. Just the act in investing in our practices does have the potential to create the political change that we need. And I think that’s valuable.

Nina: Exactly. Sometimes when big things happen in the world, I’ll still be like “but why am I making art?” But I feel like a lot of art, especially the art you make and the way you make it, is really about care too. And that care does extend out and also creates a really empathetic image. I feel like all of those things have a really big impact.

Amelia: Yeah. And no matter what you make, you can have a humanistic practice. And I think that is also really impactful. 

Nina: Definitely. Are you interested in teaching someday? Any ideas on what you’d teach? 

Amelia: I would love to teach. Intersectional feminist media studies would be interesting. I would love to teach histories through the ways that people are wrongfully projected and then the way that they project themselves. Like illustrating how the idealized white woman from Hollywood in the 1940’s has been projected onto all women. And then showing how women, black feminists, and queer people have reclaimed media and made their own projections of reality.

There’s something really potent about teaching history through media studies, for me personally, because ideologies are sustained through media. A lot of fascist ideologies are being conveyed in particular. I would love to explore that concept with people and teach in a way that’s very direct and focused on being an activist or creating positive change. And also showing the agency there when you pick up a camera and create your own projection. I think that has a lot of power and can really affect people.

Nina: That sounds incredible. I would love having you as a professor!

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Nina Vichayapai (she/her) is an artist whose research excavates for signs and representations of belonging in the globalized world around her. She explores what it means to belong within the American landscape for underrepresented communities. Born in Bangkok, Thailand, she graduated from the California College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2017. Nina currently lives in the Pacific Northwest.

https://www.nvichayapai.com/

Amelia Morrison (they/them) is an artist whose work explores feminist perspectives in images and image making. Currently, they are seeking to answer this question: What new paradigms emerge when marginalized individuals are the ones crafting images? Their work is informed by the ethics of community care and a belief that a loving approach to art making is just as valuable as the product. They are a BFA student at Portland State University.

ig: @aj.morrison