Alex Morrison

Each season, CAG releases a series of Video Visits that offer short takes on our exhibitions. Presented in five languages — Cantonese, English, French, Mandarin and Spanish — these videos present a variety of perspectives on the work of Alex Morrison and Alison Yip. 

### English Video Visits
[Alex Morrison: Nooks and Corners](https://vimeo.com/693704052)
[Alison Yip: Soma Topika](https://vimeo.com/693694179)

### Visites vidéo en français
[Alex Morrison: Nooks and Corners](https://vimeo.com/694087616)
[Alison Yip: Soma Topika](https://vimeo.com/694089419)

### Visitas de video en español
[Alex Morrison: Nooks and Corners](https://vimeo.com/694088250)
[Alison Yip: Soma Topika](https://vimeo.com/694090049)

### 普通话视频之旅
[Alex Morrison: Nooks and Corners](https://vimeo.com/693705002)
[Alison Yip: Soma Topika](https://vimeo.com/693695561)

### 粵語視頻參觀
[Alex Morrison: Nooks and Corners](https://vimeo.com/693703503)
[Alison Yip: Soma Topika](https://vimeo.com/693693734)

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Winter 2022

Video Visits

Installation image of Alex Morrison's sculptures and paintings in a gallery.

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Please join us to celebrate the closing of Alex Morrison’s *Nooks and Corners* and Alison Yip’s *Soma Topika* (both closing May 1) and the opening of Michelle Bui’s *Mutable Materialism* (on view until August 28). All ages welcome! Cash bar. 

Spring Exhibition Party

One Saturday each month, CAG invites a guest host to lead walkthroughs of our current exhibitions, offering their insights and response to the works on view. In March, Alex Morrison will speak on his project *Nooks and Corners*. No advance registration required for this event.

### Biography

Alex Morrison was born in Redruth, UK and currently lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. His work has been exhibited at White Columns, New York; La Plage, Paris; Vancouver Art Gallery; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; and Artspeak, Vancouver, amongst other venues. His work is held by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal; Museum Abteiberg; Germany; Zabludowicz Collection, London, and numerous other public and private collections.

### COVID-19
Vaccine passports will be checked for participants ages 12 and older.


A detail of a pink mushroom-like shaped sculpture by Alex Morrison. 

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Alex Morrison on Nooks and Corners

Saturday Session

CAG’s Executive Director Matthew Hyland will lead a tour of the winter 2022 exhibitions, including *Alex Morrison: Nooks and Corners*.

A detail of Alex Morrison’s painting. Eight white tulips in vase foreground abstract images. 

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with Matthew Hyland

Curatorial Tour 

For more than twenty years, the practice of Vancouver-based artist Alex Morrison has explored the aesthetics of utopian thought, whether as embedded in activism and counterculture or architecture and design. Highlighting the persistent ways radical ideals and impulses are historicized, distorted and repurposed over time, Morrison’s work traces the means by which even the most persuasive of vernaculars cycle from avant-garde to kitsch and commodity.

In *Nooks and Corners*, Morrison presents a suite of new and recent works in painting and sculpture that extend his ongoing investigation into cultural identification and the ways identity and politics are fashioned aesthetically, particularly in the domestic sphere. Whether reflecting on the migration of once-revolutionary abstractions into the decorative and ornamental, the house- plant as an object of status and signification, or architectural revivalisms emptied of their styles’ foundational integrities and optimisms, Morrison foregrounds the inevitable divergences between the original intent of a given aesthetic and its continuous, often contradictory adaptation to new social and political ends.

### Biography 

Alex Morrison was born in Redruth, UK and currently lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. His work has been exhibited at White Columns, New York; La Plage, Paris; Vancouver Art Gallery; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; and Artspeak, Vancouver, amongst other venues. His work is held by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal; Museum Abteiberg; Germany; Zabludowicz Collection, London, and numerous other public and private collections.

ProgramGuideWinter2022.pdf

CAG_AlexMorrison_ExhibitionGuide.pdf

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Nooks and Corners

The selected works for *Following A Line* dislocate the conventions of how information is gathered and presented by using standard didactic tools and methods, such as lectures, films, PowerPoint presentations, archival images and signage to convey subject matter that in some way challenges the instructive forms. The difficulty of representing knowledge, and the imperative need to demonstrate one’s understanding is common to all the works. Many of the artists in this exhibition work from an archive of images and texts, which they have compiled over years of research, but it isn’t essential to any of the artists to make this explicit or to lay out their research in an accessible form. There is an applied patina on most of the works that implies the passing of time, and the unearthing or preserving of history. The faux finishes are not necessarily used to mislead, but are meant to convey an instability and ambiguity that may be unsettling, leaving the viewer to look for something else, like the relation between images, or how objects and designs connect.



An image of the book “HOW TO See and Read the Aura.” The cover is blue with blocks of rainbow coloured patterns and large yellow text. Many tabs of yellow paper stick out from the sides of the book.

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Installation image of a projected image onto a wall in a dimly lit gallery. A black bench is placed in front. The image depicts a corner view of a bedroom’s dresser and en suite bathroom vanity. 

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A slide projector on a plinth pointed towards a white gallery wall. The projected image is small in scale compared to the wall. It depicts a black and white image of a large group of people standing.

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A large-scale iron sign mounted on a gallery wall. The sign reads A Low Variant From A Split Tongue in turquoise painted iron. The phrase hangs from an L shaped bracket that is mounted to the wall.

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A large geometric sculpture is installed in a gallery. To the right, on the wall, five framed artworks hang. Further right, two tarp-like fabrics are draped over structures to resemble human-like forms.

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Forty-four framed artworks mounted on a wall in eleven columns. Each column is a different colour gradient. Mounted on an adjacent wall is a framed photograph of a blue cover.

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Detail image of a geometric sculpture. Within the sculpture, a lit, hollowed out triangular space houses a relic-like object.

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Pablo Bronstein, Peter Gazendam, Susanne Kriemann, Kyla Mallett, Alex Morrison

Following A Line

Alex Morrison's practice spans a variety of media in work that examines the relationships between urban and domestic space, memory and the struggle for subjective identity. In past work he has problematized his subcultural identification, less as biographical source than as conceptual framework, in order to antagonize notions of sentiment, responsibility and social authority.

His new work, *Free Room*, translates these themes into a three channel DVD work based, in part, on Lindsay Anderson's cult classic film, *If* of 1968. Liberally interpolating from the film's depiction of the claustrophobic relationship between alienated youths, *Free Room* is set in a single room where the characters discuss, joke and plot about sex, politics and death — the elements of a projected free life. In this room they are rid of received ideas, giving each other license to act out their projections of agency and independence. Using images clipped from a variety of magazines, the three characters map out a set of identifications and the means to deflate them; they appropriate images in order to domesticate their rhetorical force. The work seeks to illustrate this transitional point of experience, a plane of action that is divorced from both the compliance of childhood and the complex morality of independent choice. 

Accompanying *Free Room* in the exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery will be a selection of silkscreen posters and drawings, together called *Gesucht! (Wanted!)*. Similar in theme to *not the actual apartment* (2001), these works deal with idealized architectural space as lifestyle. Morrison has adopted the visual idiom of Berlin street posters to comment on the way people employ simple aesthetic codes to transmit complex personal and political aspirations. In all of this work, Morrison compares and contrasts motifs of individual freedom and social order, role play and authenticity, idealism and subversion. 

### Biography

Alex Morrison has exhibited both nationally and internationally, and had recently held the Berlin studio as part of the Canada Council’s residency program. He has recently exhibited Free Room at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin-Kreuzberg and the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. A catalog on his work is being co-published by the Contemporary Art Gallery and Lukas & Sternberg Press.


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Installation image of drawings by Alex Morrison. 7 black and white drawings of buildings on various sized paper are mounted on a wall. 

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Installation image of posters by Alex Morrison. Five various-sized posters are mounted on the walls. The posters are coloured red, yellow, green, and light blue. Some of them are black and white.

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Detail of a black and white drawing of a narrow street between one-story houses by Alex Morrison.

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Installation image of posters. Five various-sized posters are mounted on the walls. The posters are coloured red, yellow, green, and light blue. Some of them are black and white. One poster shows the word “gesucht!” in all capital letters. 

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Installation image of video work by Alex Morrison. A video projected on a wall in a completely dark gallery space shows three people at a table working on stacks of magazine-like objects in front of them. 

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Installation image of video work by Alex Morrison. A video projected on a wall in a completely dark gallery space shows a person in a black outfit sitting at the edge of a bed reading a magazine. 

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Installation image of a three-channel video by Alex Morrison. Some phrases appear in a black background in the middle video. Two other videos show people hanging out.

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Installation image of a three-channel video by Alex Morrison. The middle video only shows a black screen. Two other videos show some images taken inside houses, including table chairs and a door. 

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Free Room

*Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas* brings together a variety of works by five Vancouver-based artists whose creative methods "show" violence, implicate danger or threaten retribution.

In the entrance foyer, Althea Thauberger's large photo-laminate poster depicts a young woman. This woman is the subject of Thauberger's *not afraid to die*, a single-channel video at the entrance to the B.C. Binning Gallery. The video was shot in front of a diorama inside BC's Provincial Museum in Victoria, and the soundtrack includes a song sung by the artist. Also in the B.C. Binning Gallery, Michelle Normoyle's ongoing series of photographs, *After Play*, document the chaos of her child's room after play with her toys. Peter Lojewski's occupation as a licensed practical nurse provides subjects for a series of roughly drawn but eloquent paintings depicting hospital wards. Other works invoke revenge fantasies against disparate mythic and historic figures, personal portraits and ruminations on environmental issues.

Pasted to the exterior of the gallery's windows, as well as on hoardings and poster boards around the city, are posters by Alex Morrison. *Patterer's Diary* is a two -part work that features a selection of short autobiographical incidents recalled in the first person past tense, accompanied by a third-person gloss on the events narrated in the poster, which can be seen in the B.C. Binning Gallery.

In the Alvin Balkind Gallery Kevin Schmidt's *Long Beach Led Zep* is a ten minute video featuring the artist playing the song "Stairway to Heaven” on an electric guitar while standing on Vancouver Island's Long Beach. As the palindromic title suggests, *Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas* draws parallels between depictions and suggestions of violence, and the impulses of mastery and aesthetic delight with which they often coexist or stem from. By expanding on these themes, the exhibition focuses on aestheticizing depictions in acts of control, catharsis and elegy.

A series of framed paintings are mounted on the gallery wall behind the sculpture. The sculpture depicts a white apartment building, on which a blue helicopter is landing. 

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Twelve framed paintings are mounted on the gallery wall behind a sculpture. The sculpture depicts a white apartment building, on which a blue helicopter is landing.  

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Texts printed on sheets of colourful paper cover the entire windows on CAG’s first floor. Some papers are much larger than the others. They are pink, yellow, blue, green, or white.

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Many sheets of colourful paper cover the entire windows on CAG’s first floor. Some papers are much larger than the others. They are pink, yellow, blue, green, or white.

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Ten coloured photographs are mounted on the gallery wall. Many of those images depict colourful objects piled up in a room. This room has a white floor and a pink wall.

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Many sheets of colourful paper cover the entire windows on CAG’s first floor. They are illuminated at night. Blue, yellow, and green colours are visible from afar. 

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A CRT TV is placed on a pedestal installed in the middle of the gallery space. The video played on the TV shows abstract shapes. Some paintings mounted on the wall are visible behind the TV.

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This photograph shows a facade of a building that stands by a street. The building is orange and many fliers are attached to the surface of this building. A bear tree stands in front of the building. 

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A single-channel video is projected on the wall inside a darkened gallery space. The video depicts a person playing a guitar on a seashore. The blue ocean is visible behind the person. 

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This photograph documents the entrance of the exhibition titled Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. A photograph of a woman standing in a forest is installed below the exhibition title. 

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Althea Thauberger, Kevin Schmidt, Michelle Normoyle, Peter Lojewski, Alex Morrison

Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas

Giving the Story a Treatment is the first comprehensive publication on Canadian artist Alex Morrison. In his documentations of youth lifestyles, particularly the culture of skaters, Alex Morrison questions to what extent sub-cultural expressions can be considered authentic, especially in the face of strategies of staging and their commercialization by the media.

Texts by Canadian writer Jeff Derksen and Danish art critic Lars Bang Larsen contribute penetrating perspectives into Morrison’s work, linking it in a historical continuum with activist moments of recent history and contemporary events.

Texts in both English and German. 


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Giving the Story a Treatment

*Public 28* is a journal of contemporary cultural issues co-published in 2002 by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; and Public Access, Toronto to accompany the group exhibition *Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas* at CAG November 15, 2002 – January 5, 2003.

This issue, *Public #28: Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas* is edited by Reid Shier and William Wood. The journal includes a CD along with contributions from Rodney Graham, Phillip McCrum, Althea Thauberger, Michael Turner, Geoffrey Farmer, Marina Roy, Michael Euyung Oh, William Wood, Ron Terada, Steven Shearer, Kevin Schmidt, Peter Culley, Reid Shier, Peter Mahovsky, Peter Hudson, Neil Wedman, Amy Pederson.

Alex Morrison

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