Category: Artist
Nationality: American
Last Year: New
While making eight films since 1998, six of them city-specific and all accompanied, in Olympian postmedium style, by hyperslick, diagram-like paintings implying nested power structures, Morris has filmed, among others, Bill Clinton (in Capital, 2001) and Brad Pitt (Los Angeles, 2004). In the past year, the artist completed her most testing project yet, Beijing (2009), shot in the secretive Chinese capital during the Olympics. Emerging as a dazzlingly modern meditation on power, spectacle, architecture and smokescreens, it reaffirms that, when it comes to positioning herself where the action’s happening, Morris is contemporary art’s designated hitter.