QCC - Performance - Derrick Woods-Morrow

Queer City Cinema Inc. (based in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada) was initiated in 1996 as a biennial film and video festival and has, over the years, come to program both film and performance art.

The organization now presents one festival annually - a combination of Performatorium: Festival of Queer Performance and Queer City Cinema: Film Festival.

This event will happen in-person at Central Library, Dunlop Art Gallery (2311 12th Avenue).

I Believe in the Future of ‘Small Countries’ (2024)

For their engagement with Queer City Cinema: International Film and Performance Arts Projects, Derrick Woods-Morrow presents ‘I Believe in the Future of ‘Small Countries’. Within the context of speculative worldbuilding the artist reconfigures the Gallery space as errogenous zone, inside and outside of time and space, myth and reality. Truncated by film elements, language exercises, and sound activations, the performance queries the coastline as place to commune with Queer spirits lost at sea. Seeing the coastline as a site of refusal, promiscuous behavior and subversion, the artist guides the audience to extend themselves beyond orgasm and instead release their pleasure into his body as a speculative excavation of collective labor. With Caribbean scholars Edouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter and Kamau Braithwaite in mind, Derrick’s new work pushes at the edges of “How sensation & desire” operate asynchronistically.

Originally from Greensboro, North Carolina, Derrick Woods Morrow’s work reflects on his experience growing up in the Black American South and centers on the exploration of Black sexuality and the complex journey in navigating this discovery. Woods-Morrow’s practice spans photography, film, installation, performance, and sculpture to capture and illustrate the queering of Blackness and the spaces in which this takes place. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Schwules Museum in Berlin; the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and UIC Gallery 400, among many other institutions across the world.

He has completed residencies at Center of Photography Woodstock (2023/2024), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2022), The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2021), Antenna Works (2020/21), Chicago ArEsts CoaliEon (2018), the Fire Island Artist Residency (2016) and ACRE (2015).

He is the recipient of the Creative Visionary Grant from the Black Artists & Designer Guild (2023), 3Arts Camargo Foundation Fellowship (2023), the Rhode Island MacColl Johnson Fellowship (2023), the Uprise Grant from the Sundance Film Institute (2021), the 3Arts Gary and Denise Gardner Fund Award (2021), and the Artadia Award–Chicago (2018).

Woods-Morrow holds a Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race in Art and Design and teaches sculpture, painting, and textiles at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Woods-Morrow is represented by Engage-Projects.

www.derrickwoodsmorrow.com

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