ARTIST STATEMENT

Morgane Poezevara-Stevens is a multidisciplinary artist and art educator. Her practice includes sculpture, painting, drawing and more recently, tattooing. As a queer person of color these identities intersect and inform the visual language and subject matter she addresses, such as investigations of community and individual healing practices as well as the art of story telling. Enthralled by the world of cartoons and animation from her childhood, she has combined her exploration in tattoos with her love for illustration in order to reimagine some of her favourite characters. The ornamentation of the body is a healing practice through the adornment of the skin with tattoos that reflect one’s sense of self. By reimagining Morgane’s beloved childhood cartoon character’s as black folk and offering them as flash, she aims to honour this transformative relationship between illustration and body art.

Ranging from Adventure Time, Foster’s home for imaginary friends, Scooby Doo, Ruby Gloom to Kim Possible, Morgane has reimagined some of her favourite queer coded characters from her childhood. These six characters have been redesigned as flash drawings ready to be tattooed on melanated folk. These characters were originally created for animation, a predominantly white male dominated field. Morgane is taking back these characters and redrawing them from a black queer perspective. In doing so she has made some aesthetic changes, focusing on the importance of the representation of diverse hair textures and styles. Afro descendant hair textures are often depicted with little movement in the realm of animation and cartoons. By offering these drawings as a flash sheet, once the ink has settled, the characters will move with you; surmounting static representations of black hair, in an attempt to inform discourse surrounding texturism in pop culture.

Contact @hauzwald to book.