Lisette Morel
January 2022-May 2023 Creative In the Wilderness
I started co-creating natural eco performances and installations during the Pandemic. Short of the regular materials I relied on, I looked towards my surroundings to provide. As I reflect, I have always been called by the outdoors–the wilderness. The textures, the chaos and order, the scent of the earth I find irresistible. We tease one another, no matter what I may be working on, I am lured back outdoors. These intimate and short interactions with the immediate environment remind me of the fire escape picnics with my sister and cousins. Growing up in the urban area, bound to the fire escape and occasional tar roof tops as our personal park, we would pack sandwiches and juice, climb out the window and with forks and knives pick at the bricks to collect our gems. We would arrange the gems, trade them and make up stories. For Into the Wilderness, I happily surrendered to this nomadic journey. At times the eco pieces are spontaneous, an authentic response to the sunlight, to acorns on the ground or found branches. Some were solo while others included my daughters. Nature provided me with the materials–the charcoal from burnt tree logs and mud from the Earth. The more I interacted with these materials the more questions revealed themselves to pique my curiosity and my journey became clearer: to embrace community dialog/collaborations and engagements, to pursue pieces based on connecting to and trusting the environment for source and letting go. Relinquishing ownership felt good as I invested time into the process. By the end of the intensified interactions, I was ready to let go and return it all to the Earth, as a cathartic experience. These ephemeral eco performances and installations reference our mortality, relationships and the fragility of our existence. I envision future eco pieces to manifest and activate in various ways in new landscapes with new results shared with community members.
All images in gallery above courtesy of Lisette Morel
Lisette Morel / Photo: Dora Nano
Lisette Morel is a Dominican-American artist, mother and educator who lives and works in New Jersey. She maintains a broad ritualistic and organic practice that includes paintings, installations, assemblages and performances. While remaining unapologetic and resisting categorization her bold, visceral and emotive explorations aims to challenge and blur boundaries, embrace and celebrate the ugly and absurd. Currently, she's using her surroundings, domestic and everyday found objects for art and life to fuse and to question the ephemeral and impermanence by focusing on detachment to a specific location. For the 12 months In the Wilderness Residency she experimenedl with eco art, durational and temporary pieces, collaborative works with her daughters, friends and colleagues and documented the presence of life with time sensitive objects and materials.
Lisette Morel is a New Jersey based Dominican-American artist, mother and educator, born in New York City. She initiated her career as a painter, and her practice has broadened to include installation/site-specific works, assemblage and performance. She embraces these as organic extensions of her body, which help her navigate, question, blur and challenge set boundaries within systems. Most recently, Lisette has been known to perform with her daughters, friends and neighbors in recurring endurance collaborations. Some of these include Run to Your Friend Until You Can’t Anymore, with performance artist Ayana Evans. In this action for Korean Art Forum they run to one another for 2-3 hours, celebrating and exploiting the strength and vulnerability of their friendship. Lisette has also created her own performances, where she utilizes found objects to mark given spaces. One of these performances includes Raw Forms Forum, curated by artist Dominique Duroseau, Newark Museum, NJ. In the Winter of 2021, she performed And You Do What They Tell Ya; And You Eat What They Tell Ya, inspired by the infamous band Rage Against The Machine. In the Winter of 2020 Morel invited neighbors to draw in the snow-covered street with mops and brooms. Her large-scale installations have been included in exhibitions with the Neo-Latino Collective group exhibit Critical Mass, Monmouth Museum, NJ. She has exhibited as well as part of the I Kan Do Dat exhibit, curated by Daniel Simmons and Oshune Layne, Skylight Gallery Brooklyn, NY. Her first solo exhibition Places You Aren’t Supposed To Go: (Don’t Play Me) Do We Still Call It Abstract Art? premiered at Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ. Awards and residencies include the First Sustainable Arts Fellow Residency, Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ, 2016; and an artist residency at Soho20 Chelsea Gallery, NY, 2012. She participated in Aljira’s Emerge10 Program and at El Museo del Barrio Fifth Biennial: The (S) Files. Lisette is a recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant. She received her Master in Fine Arts at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University and her Bachelor of Arts at Rutgers University.