Mores McWreath was born in Washington, Pennsylvania, USA in 1980 and grew up in ten different cities scattered throughout the South and Midwest.  He received a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and an MFA from the University of Southern California Roski School of Fine Arts.  He attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in 2008-09. In 2009 he had his first solo show in New York at CUE Art Foundation curated by Andrea Zittel. Recent group exhibitions include The Whitney ISP Group show at Art in General, New York, NY, 2009; Theoretical Practice at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, 2009; Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2008; Ghosts of Presence: International Emerging Artists’ Video at the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2007; and Flex Your Textiles at John Connelly Presents, New York, 2006.  His work has been screened in film festivals both nationally and internationally including Videomedeja 2009 Serbia, the Athens International Film and Video Festival, Duration: London, and the Jakarta International Video Festival.  He currently teaches undergraduates at the Cooper Union.

My art interrogates and restages the fragmented nature of human subjectivity using video, photography, sculpture, and drawing.  These artworks actively oppose the dominant cultural assumption of a unified subject.  This investigation often leads to a deconstructive self-analysis.  It is not a need to "know" one’s true self because that seems an impossible task, but it is rather a need to make public the theater of perceptions that form individual subjectivities.  The goal is to take the vaudevillian theater of the mind and project it out for others to access for the sake of identification.  The Nietzschean concept of Perspectivism posits "In so far as the word "knowledge" has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.”

My body and the bodies of others appear in my work as stacks of pieces and parts.  These piles of rubble are composed of clips, segments, and quotations from private and public, real and imagined histories.  They perform on camera in short bursts of dialogue, action or sculpture.  These vignettes allow me to quickly access a broad range of genres, styles, and sources.  The Internet has created access routes to a flood of media that I channel through various screens and filter into my work as references, homage, transformations, and appropriations.  The juxtaposition of fragmentary elements culled from the world of images creates a visual and textual metaphor for the nature of human existence in the face of overwhelming information. 

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want

Within capitalism, consumer choice is offered as a replacement for liberty.  The propaganda industry, better known as public relations, leads us to believe that given enough choices to make between products that we will have a general sense of freedom in our lives.  This industry generates campaigns for advertising and politics to sell us anything from toothpaste to healthcare reform.  My interest is in potentially misreading Devo to support a desire for the “freedom from choice.”  If what we are offered in contemporary western culture is “choice” then I believe it is a vital thought experiment to seek out a “discourse of the other of choice.”  Roland Barthes’ idea of “the neutral” is that which “baffles the paradigm” and this is the territory I am striving to reach in my artwork.  Paradigmatic thinking demands that a conclusion be found and that a final meaning be determined.  I have an ardent, burning desire to generate art and ideas beyond the binary.