Michael Morris
Michael Morris was a British-born Canadian visual artist, archivist, educator, and curator. Morris has also completed successful works in film, photography, video, installation, correspondence art, and performance.
Morris later studied at the University of Victoria and the Vancouver School of Art, where his teachers included Jack Shadbolt, Roy Kiyooka and Don Jarvis. After completing his graduate studies at the Slade School of Art, where one of his teachers was Harold Cohen, he returned to Vancouver, and became acting curator of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Centre for Communications and the Arts at Simon Fraser University. Morris, along with Vincent Trasov, founded the Image Bank in 1969, a system of postal correspondence between participating artists for the exchange of information and ideas. He co-founded the Western Front Society in 1973, and was its director for seven years.
The geometric abstractions he painted he made at the beginning of the 1970s have a sense of parody, one critic feels. He had absorbed an urban aesthetic from British Pop artists as well as the ideas of Marcel Duchamp during his training. Later, he looked to California for new materials, such as Plexiglas and mirrors. In 1968, he exhibited his Letters series in Vancouver, each with a title of a different city. However, his future art-making lay in other directions, such as Conceptual art. By 1970, many artists in Canada, Morris among them, were circulating mail art among themselves as a project linking artists and communities. Morris' work with the Image Bank has been heralded as instrumental to the early history of networking and the utilization of social interaction as art.
Creator Id: 797Virtual Collection: Original CCCA
Country of Birth: England
Year of Birth: 1942
City: Victoria
Country: Canada
Type of Creator: Artist, Curator, Writer
Gender: Male
Living Status: Deceased
Mediums: conceptual, film, installation, performance, photography, video
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Work by Michael Morris
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