Ben Morey is a multimedia artist and designer originating from and working in South Florida. Growing up amongst saccharine, theme-park automatons and sun-bleached retirement communities gave him an impermeable appreciation for the absurd and a fascination with the duality of escapism and mortality. His work borrows from the opposing aesthetics of both the medical world and vintage children’s television and game shows to further illustrate this duality while spanning a spectrum of media from drawing, painting and sculpture to interactive, digital and sound. Morey received a BFA in Interactive Media from The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) as well as the 2014 South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship. He was named one of the “Ten Artists You Need to Know” by the Broward Palm Beach New Times and has been exhibited at Art Miami, The Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, The Art and Culture Center of Hollywood and in a solo exhibition at 1310 Gallery. While he is currently a freelance designer for arts institutions and artists throughout South Florida he has previously been the Marketing Manager for Young At Art Museum (YAA) and the Design Director for the acclaimed Fort Lauderdale curatorial collective Bedlam Lorenz Assembly (BLA).
Soft focus, vintage game shows and harshly lit hospital rooms provide the pallet for Morey’s drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos, and installations created compulsively in response to social tensions, self-medication and existential frustrations. In his multimedia and increasingly interactive works issues and experiences, both personal and applicable to contemporary society, are presented in a detached and clinical manner. Often, metaphorical surrogates for these subjects are anthropomorphized in order to be dissected and analyzed as part of a therapeutic process enacted to make sense of and deflate them. They are scattered and strewn about as if by the hand of an omnipresent doctor curing and killing specimens using naive medical procedures. The subjects and the environments around them evoke the playfulness of children’s toys and the over-the-top aesthetic of retro television and psychedelia, drizzling an unnervingly cheerful sugarcoating over the tension of each image and installation.
Ten Broward Visual Artists You Need to Know
Feburary 25, 2016 – Broward Palm Beach New Times
Sugar Coated Pill: Ben Morey’s Artistic Healing
June 2015 – Cultural Quarterly
2014 Cultural Consortium Fellowship Winners Announced
October 23, 2014 – Sun Sentinel
The Art World Finds A New Home in Broward County
September 30, 2014 – Broward Palm Beach New Times
Best Curator: Bedlam Lorenz Assembly
December 2013 – Broward Palm Beach New Times
Counting Backwards: Meeting the Apocalypse With a Chuckle
November 2013 – Broward Palm Beach New Times
Those Entering Are Expecting to Be Changed
December 2011 – WeMerge Magazine
