KC Counts talks with Bill Morée, artist/photographer, about the 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibit and his work. Here is a portion of their conversation:
Bill:
It's been a really great experience, not knowing quite how this show would come together with four - our work is very different and at first I thought that was going to be, you know, a problem - that it would be such disparate voices and it turns out actually that the four bodies of work have come together, and I think complement each other really nicely. So, the shows come together really beautifully.
KC:
What is it about them that makes it a nice compliment?
Bill:
Well, for instance, I'm afraid to say his name because I'm going to mess up his last name. Alfred - he's a Guianan ceramic artist. Alfred's work is very large ceramic sculptures and he’s in the main gallery space, the main museum space. My work, they're photographs that line the walls, and Alfred's works are these very large, very massive, but very beautifully Detailed sculptures that fill the center space, and they're completely different and they don't relate to each other in any obvious way. And yet they're juxtaposition in this space kind of creates their own separate relationship that works really beautifully. And then the other two artists have these spaces that are semi-private spaces, separate rooms in the back and so you have this experience of going from, you know, Alfred’s and my work to, in the back on one side, and then Elham's work. She’s an Iranian artist who is here, just came to NMSU, for the program. And she's, you know, her work is really beautiful as well, but they're also different. And yet, their juxtaposition makes this separate, this different experience of each of the works that you wouldn't have if they weren't put together. And they've just sort of blended and made their own experience that I think turned out nicely.
KC:
Well, tell me about your work. It’s built off the concept of being trichromats? What does that mean?
Bill:
Well, so human beings and many other mammals are trichromats, which means that the anatomy, the Physiology of our vision system is that we have rods and cones, and we all learned that in school at some point. But the cones are what we see color with, and we have three kinds of cones. One is receptive to light wavelengths that are red, one for green and one for blue. So that's all we perceive in the world is red light, green light and blue light that hits the retina of our eye. Every other color that we know and see and look at is actually interpreted in our brains. It's made-up; we are not seeing yellow, we're not seeing purple. We're only seeing these three wavelengths. Now, if you take a red light, a green light and a blue light, and you shine them on the same spot, you'll get white light. It's like breaking a rainbow. And so, what happens with my work, is I thought a lot about the physiology of human beings. By the wayi not every animal is trichromatic. Goldfish, for instance, are tetramats. They see in four colors, the 4th one being ultraviolet. So, the fact that we see three colors, in my research, I thought quite a lot about this. It's our Physiology is the thing that that we all have in common, you know, beyond history, beyond gender, beyond, you know, politics or where our space, our place in history. This is the thing that we have in common is how we physically perceive. That's what my work is emphasizing. I'm not concentrating on what we are looking at. I'm looking at how we look at things. And so, this is the subject matter in the show. That is, things that I run into and perceive right here in our daily life, you know, in the Las Cruces area, it's how I'm looking at them is what is the thing that is new for me in this work. And so, the colors are very bright and very beautiful and they're very unexpected. Working this way and thinking about how we all perceive light has forced me to, after a long career as a professional photographer, this. My research at NMSU and working this way has forced me to reevaluate and and look at things in a fresh way, and that's what this show in the museum is right now. The work is colorful; It's very bright, it's very enjoyable. But the more you delve into, you know, the reasons behind it and what is going on with the photographs underneath, will hopefully cause the viewer to think a little bit more about themselves and how they perceive the world.
