Alex Morrison

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.