Matthew Morrocco, Red Rock by Vermillion Cliffs, 2019, Archival pigment print, 24 x 30 inches. Image courtesy the Artist and RSK Artworks. — Matthew Morrocco, *Red Rock by Vermillion Cliffs*, 2019, Archival pigment print, 24 x 30 inches. Image courtesy the Artist and RSK Artworks.

Holding space for one’s identity in public is a luxury that is destabilized for many during periods of political unrest. Throughout American history, beliefs and “lifestyles” that were initially nonnormative gained protection through the right to a private sphere –– access to birth control and abortion –– are just two of the stranger examples. The right to privacy has provided the most vulnerable people in society with a sanctuary, a protected place to find legitimacy and power. It has ironically allowed those same “private” individuals to exist resolutely in the general public.

Digital installation view, Colored to Suit, March 4 - April 15, 2021.  Image courtesy of the Artist and RSK Artworks. — Digital installation view, *Colored to Suit*, March 4 - April 15, 2021. Image courtesy of the Artist and RSK Artworks.

Photographer Matthew Morrocco’s recent work, Orchid is a visual study of privacy in the public sphere. Orchid – named after a crypto currency that keeps internet searches private – is conceptually drawn from both a legal and visual history of the role of privacy in the United States. Born from feelings of anxiety and vulnerability after the 2016 election, the series features Morrocco completely covered in a monochromatic morph suit as he fits himself into stunning landscapes. In doing so, the artist creates a queer counter-public, a discursive space for the marginalized, and draws attention to the essential need for sacred private spaces. I use queer in the adjectival sense of the word, as a modifier that invokes relations to power and inversions of hegemony

Matthew Morrocco, Installation view, *Colored to Suit*, March 4 - April 15, 2021. Image courtesy of the Artist and RSK Artworks.

“The right to privacy,” Morrocco writes, “is a tool used to ensure our citizenship rather than subjecthood. It is the thing that decisively tells us that, we – our thoughts, our decisions, our actions and our bodies – do not belong to the government.” Rather than hiding though, Morrocco critically expands his concept beyond a closed private space. Instead, the photographer demands the visual presence of the private within public space. In these images, the queered body is at once a part of and apart from the landscape.

Matthew Morrocco, Purple in Rocky Mountain National Park, 2019, Archival pigment print, 40 x 60 inches. Image courtesy the Artist and RSK Artworks. — Matthew Morrocco, *Purple in Rocky Mountain National Park*, 2019, Archival pigment print, 40 x 60 inches. Image courtesy the Artist and RSK Artworks.

Take, for example, “Blue Sunset in Shenandoah” where the blue figure blends with the saturated azure pallet of the mountains and sky. The body, bent at awkward angles, simultaneously pops out as the centerpiece of the image. In another image, sunset gives the organic world of “Vermillion Cliff,” a slight violet pigmentation which harmonizes with the scarlet hands and feet that reach out from shrubbery and appear like a natural part of the scenery. These keen pairings of monochromatic color within the photographic landscape add to the sense that the featured body exists in a type of liminal space. The corporeal interventions create a new locale that has the potential for freedom, imagination, and personal dignity.

Morrocco’s photographs are also compositionally stunning, particularly in scenes where the monochrome colors juxtapose their surroundings and highlight the organic way that the human body fits into the natural world. The bright red morph suit in “Orange Cliffs in Zion” stands out from the shadowed bluff where the body lays splayed, yet the angles of the limbs fit neatly into the sedimented rock formations. In “Three Views of Zebra Canyon,” the yellow body stretches and curves with a canyon that has grown smooth with time. The human form is uniform and streamlined in the morph suit, which allows it to complement the geometry of its natural surroundings.

Orchid captures the inventiveness of queer world-making. Morrocco insists on the need for privacy as a means to protect minority opinions and differences, no matter the whims of governmental change and all other forces that seek to erode it. And while a private space of one’s own is important, the morph suit as a site of visible anonymity challenges the binary distinction between a “public” and “private” sphere.

Orchid online presentation is on view until April 15 2021 and presented by RSK Artworks. Additionally, you can find more of Matthew Morrocco’s work here.