Exhibition on Display: January 22, 2021 - March 20, 2021
Works by Morgan Grasham
Memory Beast is a project about storytelling. The stories we tell matter. Stories
indicate what is important to us, they tell us who we are, and how we understand our
relationship to the world around us. Stories create and maintain realities. Social
realities, political realities, ecological realities. In Western culture, we have a
problematic archetypal story of domination over nature, often called the progress
narrative. These stories have brought us to a time of great ecological imbalance, in
which we face climate change and mass extinction. From this viewpoint, what hope is there
to be found, for a finite flourishing on a wounded earth? According to scholars like
Donna Haraway and Linda Vance, what creates new possibilities for earthly survival is
new kinds of storytelling practices. Generative, multispecies cooperative narratives
that we tell with our companion species. Memory Beast is a project that explores these
new kinds of storytelling practices, acting as a conduit between biological others and
the community. A memory beast is a physical encoding of our ideas of any particular
species (i..e. cow). It is a holotype, a representative example, not of a (cow) but of
what we think of as (cow)ness. Through participatory research with the community, I
collect stories, descriptions, and drawings, then combine them into a physical object,
a memory beast. This is placed in the field next to the biological counterpart, in order
to highlight the contrast, illuminating the differences between our ideas of cowness and
the living, breathing cow. It is a tool to see the difference, in order to see and know
the biological cow and write new stories with them. Memory Beast was completed and
installed at the University of North Texas just this month, but was not open to the
public. I am proposing to bring Memory Beast to the Fort Worth Community Arts Center
for its first public exhibition. This would allow the community who participated in
the work to see it for the first time, and open the work to its public debut. FWCAC is
a ripe choice of debut space, as it is a place devoted to the community, in a city with
a rich history with cows, the central species in this project. Here is a link to a
Virtual Tour of Memory Beast with a Q&A session: https://youtu.be/RXDJ0KkdAYw
