Alex Morrison: Nooks and Corners

About

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 houseplant 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.