#onchain
About this series
Men have the capacity to be kind, gentle and caring. We just live in a world that requires them to suffocate their emotions and sets us all up for failure. What’s more important than trying a new narrative? Complicit by Matthew Morrocco is a moving examination of what makes us human.
Complicit, photographs of older men, is about the existential reality all humans face. The work has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York University, and Columbia University.
Matthew Morrocco pulled from his deeply personal life experience to create this series, which tenderly chronicles his own intimate relationships with older men from ages 20 to 25, and the relationships men who grow old together have. Answering the question of what complicity really entails, Morrocco photographs the aging male body to delve into the themes of responsibility, consent, sexual identity, and ultimately, coming to terms with one's own mortality.
The series, which also has been published as photo book by Citizen Editions, also serves as way for Morrocco to explore what could happen to him as he ages. As we have come to more fully acknowledge since the 2016 election in the United States, older white men in particular have long been part of an unfortunate lineage of unbalanced and unchecked power affecting women and marginalized minority groups. The male emotional life, or lack thereof, has only recently felt worth deeper investigation.
Artist Bio
Matthew Morrocco is a photographer and multimedia artist living and working in New York City. His work comments on the relationship between sexuality, family, and religion, and explores how the intersection of these entities develops a person's character and identity. Morrocco was granted a Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2016, the Onward Compé Fellowship from Project Basho, Philadelphia in 2015, a Curatorial Fellowship from Columbia University in 2014, an artist fellowship at A Blade of Grass in New York, and an Award for Excellence in Visual Art at NYU in 2013. He did a residency at Picture Berlin in 2011.
Photographer: Matthew Morrocco
Twitter: @matthewmorrocco
Instagram: @matthew_morrocco
Foundation: Complicit
Photos copyright Matthew Morrocco
Supported by Jenny Metaverse.
The Jenny collection contains almost 200 works of modern and contemporary art.
DRAWLIGHTS | 1/1 – one post/one photographer, weekly. Off-chain and on-chain. By Peter Nitsch, lens-based artist, a member of Jenny Metaverse, RawDAO and lifetime Member of the Royal Photographic Society of Thailand.
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