self portrait, 2022
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
contact at jb.morton3 at gmail.com
studio at 140 58th Street
Brooklyn Army Terminal
Building B - ArtBuilt, Suite 7I
Brooklyn, NY 11220
James Burleigh Morton is an artist whose diverse working methods address relations between the historical imagination and contemporary mode of production. Traditional, conventional, and experimental approaches to photography tap into the generative capacity of a tension inherent between chance and craft.
The work complicates clean distinctions between image and material, description and abstraction, touch and sight. Intermingling commercial and artistic process, labor is figured throughout as mediator of the metabolic interaction between society and nature. A reoccurring motif of “the frame,” alludes to the dialectic between autonomy and context.
Born 1988 in Manhattan, James Burleigh lives and works between South Brooklyn and Orient Point, Long Island. In 2010 he earned a B.A. in History and Environmental Science from Union College, Schenectady, NY. Following this he was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and pursued an independent project, studying the particulars of globalized capitalist trade and making large format photographs of the commercial shipping industry. In 2012 he worked as an assistant photo editor at Fortune magazine. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy he spent four years working as a contractor, helping rebuild homes and photographing on the Rockaway peninsula. In 2016 he earned an M.F.A from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Along with partner Ella Wearing, they run conservation picture-framer, Ashmun Workshop, and continue to make and exhibit artworks.