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Brandon Morriss Ghost Dresses Fashion Without a Body
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Brandon Morris’s Ghost Dresses: Fashion Without a Body

Brandon Morris’s Ghost Dresses: Fashion Without a BodyBrandon Morris’s Ghost Dresses: Fashion Without a Body
Brandon Morris’s latest exhibition.

Published: January 26, 2025

Brandon Morris’s latest exhibition, Actress, at New York’s Europa Gallery is more than a display of sculptures—it is an uncanny meditation on presence, absence, and the human relationship with clothing. His Ghost Dresses, sculpted from fiberglass and resin, glide through the gallery space like the remnants of someone—or something—that has just stepped out of them. These haunting forms are not merely garments without bodies; they are apparitions of identity, memory, and theatricality, rendered in eerie green translucence.

Morris’s work has always leaned toward the surreal, exploring themes of function and form in unexpected ways. His previous pieces, like distorted teapots bound in stitched leather, toyed with animism, making inanimate objects feel strangely alive. But with the Ghost Dresses, he moves beyond suggestion into full-blown storytelling. Each dress appears frozen in mid-gesture: one curtsies with a hesitant grace, another twists as if caught in a sudden turn. Their fluid, weightless forms mimic motion, making them feel like characters in a silent play.

The exhibition’s title, Actress, is significant. These dresses are not just garments—they are performers, relics of unseen lives and lost narratives. They evoke the hushed intimacy of an abandoned dressing room, where costumes linger long after the actors have left the stage. In contrast to a traditional fashion show, where clothing is presented on living models, Morris strips away the human element entirely. Instead of showcasing bodies that bring life to garments, he allows the garments to possess a life of their own.

This distinction is crucial. Fashion shows are ephemeral, driven by commercial imperatives and dictated by trends. Models wear clothes to be seen, to be consumed by the public eye. Morris’s Ghost Dresses, however, reject that transaction. They are not meant to be worn, nor are they designed for a human body at all. Instead, they occupy a liminal space between art and fashion, existing as sculptures that wear their own history. They challenge the idea that clothing is merely a vessel for human expression, suggesting that garments can have their own agency, their own stories to tell.

Morris himself has expressed a fascination with the unseen—the ghosts of memory, of longing, of fear. His childhood preoccupation with the paranormal seeps into his work, not in a literal sense, but through an underlying unease. The Ghost Dresses unsettle because they are so familiar, yet so absent. Their adolescent proportions and fragile elegance recall something half-remembered, a dreamlike nostalgia tinged with the eerie distortion of childhood fears.

Ultimately, Actress is not just an exhibition; it is an experience. It invites the viewer to wander through a room of silent phantoms, to imagine the lives that once filled these spectral gowns. Morris has created a collection of sculptures that transcend mere aesthetics—they whisper, they haunt, they demand to be remembered. In doing so, he has transformed the gallery into something more than a space for display. It becomes a stage for the unseen, a place where ghosts, both real and imagined, find their form.

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