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Contemporary Art Gallery

555 Nelson Street
Vancouver, Canada
Closed for installation
until October 18, 2024

Admission always free
ArchiveExhibition
10 Sep 94until15 Oct 94

Joey Morgan

An Archive for the Lost Ones

555 Hamilton St

A closeup of a grey surface in a gallery. On it, two wooden boxes with several photo-transparencies in metal frames with yellow stains lay. More of these lay in front of, and beside, the boxes.

An Archive for the Lost Ones was created while Joey Morgan was living in Brooklyn, New York. During the 1980s she lived, worked and exhibited extensively in Vancouver producing several site specific installations that incorporated numerous mediums such as sculpture, photography, collage, video, and audio.

Morgan's work has consistently explored an interest in the psychology, the instability and the ambiguity of actual and dreamed experience. In An Archive for the Lost Ones she has presented an environment reminiscent of an archive and a laboratory. The black and white image transparencies are like fleeting moments of a past time or a dream. The glass plates sandblasted with texts and associative medical specimens combine words which are drawn from The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, a writer's manual originally published in 1921 by Georges Polti that describes all possible plot-lines. Morgan's installations are poetic in their beauty but disturbing in their effect.

The audio component of An Archive for the Lost Ones is a ten minute eight track sound work alternating with a ten minute recording of a clear running stream.

This is Joey Morgan's first solo exhibition in Vancouver since 1988. Recent solo exhibitions have been installed at Printed Matter in New York, The Power Plant in Toronto and at Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing, France. She also participated in the 1992 Sydney Biennale in Australia.

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