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 from large-scale, interactive installations to digital interactives, sculptures, paintings and drawings that all either directly require public interaction or incorporate aspects of the people in his immediate community within each piece. 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 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His work has been commissioned by YAA Museum, including the semi-permanent, large-scale, interactive installation FunVision, and the digital interactive Flux Face for Art Miami 2018. While he is currently a freelance designer for arts institutions and artists throughout South Florida he previously served as the Marketing Manager for YAA Museum and Design Director for the acclaimed Fort Lauderdale curatorial collective Bedlam Lorenz Assembly (BLA).
The overarching impetus behind Morey’s work is creating spaces and experiences that allow for the playful contemplation of how we maintain or jeopardize the precariousness of our mental and physical health, and either process trauma or choose escapism as a coping mechanism, all while presenting this difficult subject matter in ways that are welcoming, visually stimulating and accessible in settings that include museums, galleries, project spaces, art fairs and public art interventions. Soft focus, vintage game shows and harshly lit hospital rooms provide the palette 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
