The first major survey of Polaroids by the queer, Boston School photographer Mark Morrisroe, Focus Series: My Life, Mark Morrisroe: Polaroids 1977-1989 featured one hundred and eighty-five photos and three films of the photographer, his lovers, and friends. Morrisroe had created a substantial corpus of photos, paintings, and films before he passed away at the age of thirty from AIDS-related causes. His Polaroids are his most celebrated works, ranging from obsessive self-portraits to melancholic landscapes, many of them collaged, painted, toned, blurred, distorted, double-exposed, or otherwise transformed.
Curator Klaus Ottmann selected a representative range of Polaroids from the approximately eight hundred in Morrisroe’s oeuvre, which he presented chronologically in relation to the events of the artist’s life. Ottmann particularly highlighted work from the early 1980s as “Mannerist” in quality, an effect of their artificial elegance and compositional intricacy; he compared other Polaroids, especially the self-portraits, to early photos by Walker Evans.
Focus Series: My Life, Mark Morrisroe: Polaroids 1977-1989 was part of the museum’s Focus Series (1992–1998), which was dedicated to presentations of distinct bodies of work by artists working in all media and featured a roster of distinguished local and international artists.
Focus Series:My Life, Mark Morrisroe: Polaroids 1977-1989 was organized by Klaus Ottmann, Curator, the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery in the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University.