What Holds the Ground? — noahemorrison.com

Noah Emanuel Morrison

What Holds the Ground?
Artist’s Book
Toned Gelatin Silver Prints, Photogram, Serigraphy
2022

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This project was birthed in the incubator space of my Brooklyn, New York apartment during the most intense periods of the COVID-19 pandemic, throughout 2020 and early 2021. It later developed from a curiosity around an image that I saw repeated in my scanned negatives from this period. I discovered that, while at home and without any structure for the first time in my adult life, I had inadvertently taken the same image in the same place almost 30 times. While I had nothing to do but think about the difficult state of the world, minute changes in my most intimate relationships, and my own fragile psyche, I had somehow found a visual rhythm I returned to over and over.

The artist’s book and series of prints are testaments to these photos as markers of fraught time. Individually, they point to the feeling one might have when rising up out of a swimming pool for air. Each day became caught up in the condensed thought space of the apartment. In these moments I returned with my camera’s lens to the same spot, I reflected upon this strange visual rhythm I had discovered. That familiar gasp of air, its contents slightly different each time, defined the time, the space, and the photos in this body of work.

As a collection, the images point to feelings many people around the world shared during the pandemic - malaise, uncertainty, fear, and comfort or discomfort in that which was closest. The images also deal with themes that pervade my work, like boundaries between interior and exterior, desire for intimacy, and the movement of an image through time. Together, they are a testament to the relationship between my husband and I during the early pandemic, an exploration of the interstitials present in our apartment during the same time, and a cascading record of small and steady transformations in the direction of the unknown.

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