“Growing up in Nashville, Tennessee, historically, Southern females were sometimes implicitly taught to deflect their own idiosyncratic perspective—to conform. This anachronistic pressure lingered even when I was growing up. I subvert this dynamic by giving vulnerable femininity a grand presence. I bestow this empowered agency onto my anti-heroines, letting them force the viewer to face this discomfort.

I construct a stage with an anti-heroine whom I do not rescue. What might it feel like to be in her shoes? Furthermore, I cast difficult figures such as Mia Farrow in the 1968 cult film Rosemary’s Baby, Typhoid Mary, the Irish immigrant cook and disease vector, and Martha Mitchell, (wife of the Nixon administration attorney general) who was caught up in Watergate and slandered as a quintessential unreliable narrator. I place these women in a position to be reconsidered.

Through exaggerated scale and uncomfortable cropping I create a suggestion of danger that takes place beyond the edge of the canvas. Interweaving articulate figuration with distorted perspectives invites the viewer to question what they think they know about historical characters or fictional stories. In capturing the anticipation of conflict, I allow for new ways of knowing these archetypal figures.”

Morgan Ogilvie earned her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2020 and currently serves on the CalArts Alumnx Council. Her MFA thesis work obsessively focused on the film Rosemary’s Baby. With many implicit allusions to the contemporary cultural climate, this work was featured in an Artforum.com MFA Spotlight and a five-painting portfolio published in the Vassar Review issue “Protest, Prophecy, Play.” She attended the Vermont Studio Center Residency this February and Imagine Entertainment, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s famed production studio, selected paintings from Ogilvie’s time at CALARTS for display. She participated in and helped organize the group show, Time is Out of Joint, published in Hyperallergic, held at the MAK Center in LA, and curated by the artist and composer Scott Benzel. Ogilvie has also garnered significant regional attention from the Nashville Scene, the curated registry Locate Arts, Nashville Arts Magazine and Number:Inc. She had her first solo show, False Flags, based on a single film still from “Dead Weight,” a 1971 episode of the television series Columbo, at the John C. Hutcheson Gallery at Lipscomb University, an event profiled at length on Columbophile.com, the preeminent Columbo curation site. (Naturally!) Lost in the Funhouse, a monumental installation at the Marnie Sheridan Gallery at Harpeth Hall, became part of the campus’s life for six months. The senior curator of the Frist Art Museum, Katie Delmez, chose the painting “The Annunciation” for the 2022 Art of the South exhibition at Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville and, yes, that painting was also of Mia Farrow, in Rosemary’s Baby.