Don’t Dream It, Be It
Harley Morman
Southern Alberta Art Gallery
May 11 – June 22, 2024
Interview by Migueltzinta Solís
There’s something about Harley Morman’s work that makes you want to sink your teeth into it. I’ve been close friends with Harley for seven years – in the good times and the bad – and I always look forward to being transported to the colorful, gummy world that is his trans, queer creative practice. We are at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG) during Lethbridge Pride, a few hours after riding together in the parade as part of our local queerdo bicycle club. After what I felt were too many cheering children, it feels good to bask in the simmering glow of plastic, rubber, and knitted objects that comprise Harley Morman’s solo exhibition, Don’t Dream It, Be It.
The exhibition space, once a library, is transformed by an overlay of trans-metaphysical subliminality. Coloured tape crisscrosses the hardwood floor, mirrors hang from above on bright plastic chains, nearly life-size Perler bead self-portraits stand sentinel, and lenticular images wiggle and wink as you move through the room. A knitted rope sways from the ceiling, delightful yet foreboding, ending in a sprinkling of rainbow aquarium gravel. A full wall is dedicated to an enigmatic map made from strips of tape which, upon scrutiny, reveals itself to be a play diagram for the exhibition space. At the end of the room, behind the hanging mirrors, a scoreboard with a clock, and a rainbow collage of plastic figurines surveil the visitor. Inhabiting the space, one may feel that a game is in play, and one, in their queerness, might feel a looming sense of anxiety about what the game is, what the rules are, and whether they are getting it “right” or not.
Migueltzinta Solís (MS): Hi, Harley. (laughs)
Harley Morman (HM): Hi, Miguel. (giggles)
MS: My first question is, who are the different Harleys in this show?
HM: There are a lot of different Harleys here. There’s the Harley that is me, that’s my body…
MS: That I’m talking to.
HM: Yes! That is speaking. There’s also a ton of different Harleys. The most literal Harley is the work that is called Megan number 3: Harley. It makes good narrative sense to say it was the last thing I finished for the exhibition. There are three Perler bead works in this show. Each one represents me at a different stage of my transition, which wasn’t the plan at first.
When I made the first Megan, the one that looks like it’s diving for a clock, it’s trying to catch something. That Megan was made during my MFA, for a specific project that was essentially me bouncing around the volleyball or balloon-like heads of teachers who I had worked with during my MFA. I had worked with Perler beads before, and at the time when I made that Megan, in 2016, it represented a new direction in terms of the size and complexity of the pieces in terms of the way I was using and interpreting colour information. I wanted to make more of them.
The second one is from 2019. That was made specifically for the Dunlop Art Gallery in an exhibition of queer art on the prairies. Each one that I make of these gets bigger and more complicated in terms of the pattern. The third one took a long time, much longer than they normally do, even though I’ve gotten quick at it. Although I’m slower than I might have been before 2017 just because of the plaid jacket I’m wearing in the work.
MS: I like this idea of increasing complexity over multiple iterations or replications of Harley. First, I relate to the complexity of embodiment across these different replications of self. In simpler language you could say, “the complexity of gender,” but because of the temporal and kinetic questions here, it’s more than just about gender, which is why I love this work. I’m curious to hear you say more about the kinetic movements or actions that the figures are doing.
HM: Each of the figures represents an evolution of complexity of how I’m working with material. But in terms of the gestures that each of the figures is doing: each one plays off the others but could be understood as – I don’t want to use the word “evolution” – but is a direct response to the others. In the first one, I’m in a diving action pose because originally, I wanted to make it look like I was attempting to catch the heads that were coming at me, that were bouncing all over the place. They were up high and coming at the viewer and at the “me” that was on the wall. I wanted to make it look like that figure was an approximate life-size figure actively interacting with things. But if you look at my pose, the diving pose, it’s very much a responsive pose. I have my hands together, clasped with my wrists flattened, in the way that I [was] taught that you’re supposed to hit a volleyball. I never really knew how to hit a volleyball. It’s watching: that figure is looking up towards stuff but is very much in a ready pose but not in a “go” pose yet.
In the second one, where my hands are up, I was imagining something akin to a volleyball serve– there’s no reason that I’m using volleyball as a metaphor here aside from the fact that it was a sport that as a girl in the Midwest, I was often called upon to do in gym class. It was also a thing that because of my vision problems, I am hopeless at it and always have been. I’m just incapable of seeing things that come at me fast. Anyway, I was thinking of the jumping up action and reaching for something, so it looks a little bit more active. And here in this exhibition, it’s reaching up towards an alarm clock that’s sitting at the top of the wall.
In this third one, I wasn’t sure if it would quite “go” because it’s not an indoor sport: I’m riding a bicycle. The bicycle is rendered photographically except for the outline of the bike, which is in flat colors that are similar colors to the wall. And it’s away from the others. The other two on either side of the scoreboard are a symmetrical set. But this is something else, it’s away and it’s very much watching what’s happening.
MS: I love this hypothetical engagement with sport. (laughs)
HM: It is very much just an imaginary sport. The lines on the floor seem to be fooling people, and that’s what they’re supposed to do, but they’re not based on any sort of official diagram. I’m looking at the scoreboard with the mirrors, and there is a “basketball key,” a word that I only knew when I said that I wanted to make one. I think sport and activity in this show is not a literal reference to actual practices, it’s more a field on which actors play.
MS: As a gay villain, I, of course, love the language of “fooling people.” I love the queer permission you’ve given yourself to define the space into an imaginary sports field.
HM: Most of the time, a lot of the references really core to this show are not visible. And I don’t expect them to be and it’s not necessary. I wanted it to look like a gym. When I was in elementary school, the only reason I would participate in sports activities was when I was forced to. I was always sitting to the side and crafting. No matter where we were, whether we were indoors or outdoors, I was always finger knitting.
MS: Is that what this is over here?
HM: Yeah. Kind of. It’s not literally the finger knitting that I made long ago. So, the finger knitting, you’re using your fingers as the pegs or needles so there’s only four of them. It ends up making super thin and loose rope that doesn’t have a really good use.
MS: In looking at this long rope of finger knitting that attaches to the ceiling with a carabiner and ends on the floor in a pool of…is that aquarium gravel?
HM: It’s aquarium gravel, some plastic gems, and a few beads. I wanted something to be on the ground. I wanted for this knit object to look at least as threatening as the original object felt to me. The aquarium gravel is there as an uncomfortable fall, instead of there being a cushy mat underneath. If you attempted to climb this, you’d fall onto an uncomfortable surface that would be super jabby.
MS: That would probably stick to your skin and leave those little indents.
HM: [The gravel] is its own security since it makes so much noise if you step on it. You can hear it, easily, outside of the gallery.
MS: I saw the diagram of the space on the wall, and the thing that made me realize that it was a diagram of the space – a bird’s eye view of the space – was the gravel there.
HM: The diagram is so provisional and messy looking; I don’t expect people to necessarily know what it’s supposed to be. Because my work tends to be so intricately thought out and polished, the way that this drawing came together was kind of uncomfortable. It’s weird to say that fully intuitive making can be uncomfortable, but it is. When I saw the court lines on the floor, they gave me permission to have the drawing on the wall be as wacky as I wanted it to be. I used a level to make the blue and pink lines on the background, but everything else was done by eye. When I look at it, in one sense it’s kind of a picture of how I’m dizzy, because it’s not straight or even kind of straight in a typical way. The whole thing is a bit rotated in exactly the way things are spinning for me all the time.
…The drawing on the wall was hypothetically meant to represent a real thing but the drawings on the floor – the messiness and the realness, the solid, well-delineated care of the essentially imaginary sport – I feel that is an important dichotomy in terms of “realness” and “imagination.”
MS: I feel like this is a map of how you move as well. I can visualize you moving in this set of blue lines much more easily than I can imagine myself. It represents you offering your own perspective and experience of a space and how you move through it.
HM: I love that. The lines did have a logic when I was making them. I forget what that was, and I don’t think it’s important. The important thing was some of them were meant to represent actual physical trajectories and others, sidelines, looking back and forth.
MS: You described this piece as important as well as uncomfortable.
HM: That is important, oh my gosh. I mean the drawing on the wall was hypothetically meant to represent a real thing but the drawings on the floor – the messiness and the realness, the solid, well-delineated care of the essentially imaginary sport – I feel that is an important dichotomy in terms of “realness” and “imagination.”
MS: I feel like there’s something in here about the difference between the hypothetical and embodied experience, and how it relates to understanding “the rules of the world.”
HM: A lot of my past work has been concerned with the rules and conventions of gallery spaces and institutional spaces. I think part of what I have a hard time articulating is just the fact these are good visual metaphors for the difference between the smooth and the striated.
The Scoreboard is one of the things that I have shown before. It was in the iteration of the show that was at the Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA). When it was at the AGA, it was much more prominent because of the lighting, and the color of the walls, and the way the space was set up in general. It was essentially the focus of the entire room and it’s not necessarily that prominent here. It reads not as the most important thing that you see upon entering but just as one of many. The Scoreboard was made to only be legible when you stand inside the arc of the mirrors. If you look in a mirror, you could see not only yourself but also the scoreboard and things reflected the right way round. The clock is running the right way in the reflection, you can read the mirrored letters that are on The Scoreboard.
I love when people take selfies in the reflection, so that things are the right way around. Because generally The Scoreboard is incredibly ambiguous – it is not, and I don’t want it to be, apparent what it’s tracking. I think of it actively, and I know it doesn’t necessarily read like this directly because on one level it is very colorful and full of glittery beads and it’s shiny. But I think of it as a threatening piece, in the same way I think of gross, dirty climbing things as also being very threatening just by their existence. It’s just the idea that you might be tracked or that something about your interaction will be seen and could be accounted for.
MS: It’s a looming metric.
HM: Yeah, exactly! I mean in terms of transness, which was obviously a huge thing when I was making it back in 2021, it’s like competition as a bodily metaphor, but also a representation of tracking in terms of the timelines of change, of transition, and of growth and change in general.
MS: I think we both know that within trans experience and trans societies, there is a weird competitiveness. Whose transition is the best, who’s doing it right.
HM: It’s one of the things everyone knows, and nobody likes, but also you end up participating in it. I often find myself, or parts of my brain, echoing this hypercompetitive [sense]…I don’t think I necessarily have good things to say about that. It’s like tracking bad behaviour, bad feelings in general. This is very different from the affect that I think this show has for most people. I want it to, when you really think about it or look at it in the right way, look not happy but kind of threatening and scary.
MS: I definitely see it as sinister. A lot of people are like, “It’s playful”, “It’s a game”, “It’s a fun thing,” and “Kids will love it.”
HM: Yeah, and it is, and kids do absolutely love it. And I love that they love it, but also that’s only one reading of it and it’s not the most interesting reading of it.
MS: I think it’s interesting in the context of recent trans history, how we are from the late 90s, early 2000s, certainly in terms of FTMs and trans men, which is language that isn’t even cool anymore. We had Buck Angel and Chaz Bono and there were these metrics of passing and who had the most masculinization result. And then, of course, more recently there has been a shift away from that but now we have metrics of who has the better politics. It’s like whose is the best gender.
HM: But the gender isn’t necessarily based on hairiness. The gender is like a different, less physical aesthetic, but a politicized aesthetic.
MS: Hypothetical gender. Who has the most evolved gender and self-contextualization.
HM: Oh my god.
MS: Like the metric is different but there’s still a metric, but what even is it?
HM: In a way a person could think of it as being worse because it’s wider, and there are so many more expectations because transition is very much hypervisible at the moment, and because it’s so visible, the one who is undergoing transition is accountable to an even wider group of people.
As I’m standing over here, through the arc of the mirrors I’m looking at the lenticulars over there and thinking about how the stripes look like bars in a way. Some of them, not all of them.
MS: Because my work has been about trans self-imaging, I’m curious about the way the mirror’s been working in here and the way time is part of that. Because there doesn’t seem to be mirrors without clocks in here.
HM: I like the mirrors with the references to time because of how it implicates a person and their body at a specific moment. It’s hard to not realize that you’re a viewer, which I insist on hitting people over the head with. I think there are considerably less mirrors in this show than there are in most of my shows. What are they reflecting? It’s kind of like going back in time, in a way. I feel like it’s important to have mirrors with the lenticular stuff because they do a weird thing with simultaneity and travel.
I’ve heard from some trans people who come into the show and see the lenticulars, that they make them feel weirded out and uncomfortable. Because I started transitioning so late and had already been practicing for years, it was not even a thought that I could or might want to be secretive about it. It seems like the obvious thing to do for me at this point in my life and career, to be completely fine with having my old photos interlaced.
MS: Transness has different generations that are not necessarily attached to chronological time. How I feel you and I are of a similar trans generation even though you started your transition later in life than I did, and our transitions happened within distinct decades of trans history and discourse. And it’s very different than the other generations that are simultaneously unfolding.
HM: Yeah, that makes sense in terms of me because you’re always teasing me by saying how my gender is very anachronistic like my gender is a time period. I’m kind of curious about how my students might interpret the lenticulars. I hope that at least some of them might think that this was naughty. (laughs) Like it was somehow transgressive to show them blending into each other instead of a binary on/off situation.
MS: I certainly find these works to be very transgressive. As a completely immersive space, I sense the question, “Am I doing it right?”, on a societal level. “Is this how it’s done?”
HM: Yes, that exact thing. That nebulous sense of anxiety about “Am I being watched?” and “Is this okay?” is really important.
MS: “Is this how you play the game?” “Am I winning?” “Is this scoring?”
HM: (laughs) Yeah. The fact that it’s in a gallery, in an art space considered in relation to not trans but art communities, which are their own kind of weird hyper-competitiveness.
MS: To go back to lenticulars, and unease, I would say that in their layered-ness, discomfort, and unsettling-ness, they express the embodied experience, that is both uncomfortable and really rich, of being a person stretched across different points of time, mapped through gender pinpoints, kind of like that map over there.
HM: Oh my gosh, I love that. I think that kind of temporal experience of aging and of thinking about yourself…because I think, or hope, everyone would probably think or feel this like they’ve been several different people since they were that age. In the past 25 years, I’ve been a bunch of different people. Some are probably a lot more important than technically whichever gender I might be perceived as. I feel like aside from transness, the depiction of aging might be relatable more generally.
This little best girl and best boy (referring to stickers on the gallery wall display) is one of my favorite things in the show. It’s just one of the scholastic stickers and both exist as separate stickers and all I did was just put them together and they worked perfectly. I feel like the scholastic stickers in general are rich in terms of references and material and lend themselves to turning into lenticulars. This cluster wall doesn’t get a lot of attention, but one of things that I like is the big clock. This wall – the eyes that are at the important points, the twelve, the three and the six, etc, are all eyes from stickers. This wall has just a bunch of other references to surveillance and stuff.
MS: Metrics of performance and surveillance. Can we just touch on that? (Referring to the front page of a notebook with handwriting displayed on wall.)
HS: Yeah, that’s an actual page from a notebook because I said I’m a keeper, I do have all the paperwork I’ve produced throughout school and after that because I keep everything. I feel really justified in it because it’s coming in handy, repeatedly.
MS: Given that the paper refers to Megan’s rules, have you been following Megan’s rules?
HM: I can’t remember what Megan’s rules are. “This is a notebook, my notebook. Don’t bother it or you’ll have to answer to me.” I think that I’ve totally virtually destroyed Megan’s notebook by removing the cover.
MS: “P.S. Have fun”, is that what it says at the bottom?
HM: I think it probably does.
MS: Was there more you wanted to say about this wall?
HM: No, I just wanted to say, “Surveillance eyes!” (Points at lenticulars of eyes.) I just wanted to point them out.
MS: Transness continues to be so surveilled in terms of policy, particularly in Albertan trans and queer school and health policy right now. I think this show expresses the metaphysical experience of that kind of surveillance that is part of trans experience.
HM: Like what are the psychic implications of surveillance that trans people put themselves under before transitioning, or just in general, because of gender feelings.
MS: Yeah totally, think about in medical transition when you go on hormones, you have to do the experimental dose and you self-surveil as part of that. There’s an expectation to self-surveil.
HM: Yeah, it’s a requirement.
For more of Harley’s dizzy delights, follow him on IG: @Harley_Morman.
For more queerdo adventures that include Harley & Migueltzinta, visit his website here.