QUEUE Gallery is honored to present TEETHING, the first Miami solo exhibition by QUEUE-represented multidisciplinary artist Morgan Leigh (b. 1993, Napa Valley, CA). Opening Wednesday, December 3rd during Miami’s Art Week.
Having spent much of the past decade raising her daughter while sustaining her practice in Phoenix—taking walks together through the desert under the rising sun and collecting both physical and spiritual materials for her studio, Leigh’s environment has become inseparable from her work. Themes of grief, love, motherhood, and their attendant surrender move through her pieces in a steady dialogue between the body and the land that holds it. Her daughter, Celadon, born around the time of the passing of both of Leigh’s adoptive parents—serves as a marker of distance from loss. Across two years of intimate conversations with QUEUE’s founder and curator, Leigh has often reflected on the evolving relationship between grief and her sense of self as a black woman and mother, often noting that the same qualities her practice demands are the ones motherhood calls her toward. Her daughter's presence as a muse appears not representationally in the work, but atmospherically: in the loosened mark, the softened color, the quiet willingness to let light, and hope, in.
TEETHING is rooted in the inherited feminine labor of tending, the weight of what remains, and the rugged, perpetually unfinished terrain of grief. Leigh describes her years living parallel to the desert as a state of “pure emptiness”, a clearing where the old scaffolding of her life and practice has fallen away, allowing new forms of understanding to float to the surface.This instinct to shed reveals itself in works where found snake moult intertwines with off-white house paint and foam. The paint, echoing her recurring impulse to repaint each new home entirely white as an intuitive ritual of domestic purification, now signals the convergence of her current studio vocabulary. Together, these materials form a literal and metaphorical record of shedding, cleansing, and renewal. Her practice, wild, tender, and resilient, carries a quiet levity while holding close the wildness and power held in the bones of Black women and the sacred tether between life and loss.
In an interview earlier this February, Leigh reflected on her time camping in the Petrified Forest:
“The stars are surreal. Every sunrise and sunset is this 360-degree globe of detail. You can’t replicate the moisture in the air at 4:30 a.m. in April. Each day feels like a lifetime because everything is so stripped back. The elements are present. The sun rises, it’s dark and scary, then pastel skies. It’s cold; everything is frozen; dew turns into rainbows. A few hours later it’s all gone and the heat comes. The soil shifts. The shadows. The colors. The birds. The whole cycle happens every single day. I think that’s why I love minimalism—you get to the essence of things. You understand time differently.”
In presenting Leigh’s work to Miami for the first time, QUEUE Gallery invites viewers into a moment where, through the vessel of her works, they can briefly experience these moments of communion with the land's pulse which she describes–as the day rises, unfolds its elements, and renders us small, humble, and grateful. In experiencing Leigh's works, one might recall the stones and small earthly treasures once tucked into their own childhood pockets, and consider the metaphorical stones carried into adulthood: the growing pains, the shedding, the relentless work of becoming. TEETHING offers an intimate record of a living artist tracing her emotional terrain through the tones and textures of the earth surrounding her, inviting us—through beauty—to reflect on our own frictions of transformation.