Mickey L.D. Morgan is a TransLesbian Jewish bookmaker and social practice artist who works primarily with storytelling, translation, diaspora, anti-racism, de-colonialism, queering, cripping, and altogether reimagining the ways we hold space with one another. They hold a bachelor’s degree from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (ECUAD), with a major in Visual Arts and a minor in Social Practice and Community Engagement. They have been in several group shows focussing on visual arts, and recently finished a fellowship with Patio Press and ECUAD printing covers for the second edition of their anthology DOYKAYIT. In current community work, they are working on the project Mapping East Van. They also had the pleasure of being one of many advocating to create and becoming a transcriber for the project On the Record: The BC Jewish Queer and Trans Oral History Project, part of a partnership with local organizations Jewish Queer and Trans Vancouver (JQT) and the Jewish Museum and Archive of BC (JMABC).
Artist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mickeym00rgan/
Artist Statement
Practicing the oral-written paired tradition of Judaism with an emphasis on translating for multiple points of access, Negev Varod/Seeing Pink is a visual-scroll-format and audio-collage thought-stream poem focussed on pink-washing, the act of propagandizing 2LGBTQ+ acceptance in order to obscure systemic violence. The settler-colonial metropolis of “Vancouver,” the location of the artist and Digital Carnival Z, is also guilty of pink-washing. Mickey considers it their responsibility to publicly and explicitly critique what tokenized acceptance of white Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and sometimes Trans folx does in violence to their racialized siblings both here and far beyond colonial borders. Though since the construction of race all Jews have been and often continue to be unequivocally racialized, and branded as Semitic and other, upon the diaspora of the holocaust light-skinned Jews, mostly Ashkenazis, have assimilated as white people in this New World. As a binary oppositional result of this colonial mindset, Mizrahi Jews, dark-skinned and Black Jews, Palestinians and other Arabic speakers are racialized and coloured. This analysis charges the colour symbolism that is woven into the artist’s personal experience and is designed to play off of readers’/viewers’/listeners’ deep-seated understandings of these themes as colonized and/or colonizers.
In this poem, the idea and function of 2LGBTQ+ in racist and zionist existence is questioned, mapped, translated, decolonized, and re-imagined in relation to embodying an understanding of Home that is only known in Western-colonial diaspora. The necessary heart of this work is intersectional agitation and hope for Home. In the way that Negev Varod/Seeing Pink is true to the artist’s understanding of these constructs in cis-hetero-colonial-patriarchy, readers, viewers, and listeners are too able to experience Mickey’s attempt to locate using the colours and rhetoric in their vocabulary. A vital result is their imagining new colours, ideas, and understandings in coalition with those who are also fighting for an alternative way to be.