#pard morrison

Joyful: A Group Exhibition

Pard Morrison: The Forest

Pard Morrison: The Forest

June 17 - July 17, 2022

Opening Reception with the artist: Friday, June 17th, 5 - 7 PM

Despite hard metal and sharp edges, Pard Morrison’s aluminum sculptures create an effect of playfulness, of movement and animation. Standing still, they emit a keen sense of aliveness.  With their brilliant colors, lively geometries and stark physicality, the metal sculptures are the result of Morrison’s conversation with nature, with his personal contemplations in the forest. 

A Geometric Abstractionist, Morrison welds sheets of aluminum into box-like forms. Each color is individually hand brushed pigment fired in an oven, not unlike glazing ceramics. Every color is fired separately in order not to contaminate its neighbor so the energy of the lines and the clean color shifts create a feeling of flow and movement. The almost mathematical placement of color and form create a sense that the sculptures might be artificially fabricated but Morrison’s deliberate brush work is a clear part of the painting, adding the human touch of mark making.

The show features a collection of columns and sculptures; one small cube of colored patterns known as a Flower, as well as assorted wall installations and 7 free standing columns of varying sizes, one of which rises 12 feet into the air.  Morrison’s dreamlike forest is the expression of his wanderings, the result of his insights into nature and wilderness.  The colors are wild and explosive but the sculptures themselves are very controlled with hard edges and tight, exacting lines. He uses color “as a compositional tool which is inherently emotive.” Morrison strives for affirmative emotions, art that is uplifting and inspiring. The pieces are delightful without being naïve; playful but not frivolous. 

Metal Mash Up: A Group Exhibition

October 14 - November 7, 2021

Reception: Friday, October 29th, 5 - 7 PM

A group exhibition will always be a balancing act – bringing together the works of several artists under the umbrella of a common thematic program, and exploring the dynamics of how these pieces will push and pull against and with each other. In Metal Mash Up, playing on the idea of a mash up in music or literature – bringing together various disparate works of often wildly different genres to create a new whole – we get an opportunity not only to explore a range of metalworks by eight masters of their materials – but the chance to dig into nuance, detail, and difference in ways that a single-artist show wouldn’t allow.

While all the artists here are workers in metal, their work also falls, if only academically, into the categories of Minimal or Reductive art, where the work of art itself, in its materiality, form, colors, textures, becomes the focus. This work cuts out choices: subject matter, representation, it reduces decisions about color (most of these works are either monochrome or bichromatic) and often about shape and proportion. The information offered to the viewer by the artist, through the work itself, is minimal, paired back. And yet here in Metal Mash Up it is clear to see the amazing variety that still exists under this reductive category. These contrasts bring into relief an elegant austerity against the wild and sweeping inventiveness that humans are capable of achieving.

Constance DeJong marries paradoxical worlds within her wall-mounted copper pieces. Here mathematical formula and exacting precision determine the forms, while DeJong invites chaos into the play of her chemical patina process. The warm glow of the copper beneath the smokey black patina forms an echo or light-reflection on the wall behind, where the raw copper edges and backs show through. Michael Post’s metal ellipses both complement and contrast with DeJong’s. The metal discs, mounted at an angle to the wall so that they seem to hover, present matte smooth-colored surfaces to the eye: monochrome – whether black or color (aqua, red) – but behind them floats an ambient halo of color: neon green, lemon yellow, citrus-soda orange. While the affect is similar to DeJong’s copper light-shadows, here they are achieved in precisely the opposite way – material artifice versus the lambent property of the material itself.

Heiner Thiel’s arced, anodized aluminum pieces present another permutation of this theme. Here the pieces arc out from the wall, shards of a much larger imaginary sphere. While DeJong and Post’s works reflect color behind themselves to the wall – Thiel’s creates an effect of shadow and color within the concave surface. The movement of light within the curve changes the eye’s perception of color and creates almost the effect of a hovering or shimmering of color.

Thiel’s bright colors speak, in turn, to Jeremy Thomas’ lushly vivid, complex-formed cold-forged steel sculptures. These finned and bulbed and dimpled pieces somehow manage to look as if they are newly evolving organic creatures being born from the chemical-slick of high civilization (paradox again).

Roy Thurston’s Aluminum wall panel works, with their gently finessed folds and their finely etched and scraped surfaces in turn harken back to Thiel and Post in the precision of their format. The ever so fine bowing fold in the panel allows for activation of light across the textural surfaces. The affect here is of movement. If light is being used behind and within the works of Thiel, Post, and DeJong – here it is brought back to the surface.

The subtilty of Thurston’s work presents a complement to Elliot Norquist’s understated Folded Corner painted aluminum work – with its contrast of white and natural metal coloring, inverted triangle and the lighthearted way that the fabricated Phillips flathead screws are made part of the artwork itself. The inherent humor in Norquist’s work in turn speaks to Pard Morrison’s bright and multi-colored works of puzzle-like cubes painted on metal, with their outrageous and provoking titles, like Bad Tempered Prom Queen. Morrison’s complex color patterns trick the mind into seeking repetition, order – and instead refuse to fully complete the pattern, to confuse the expectation.

And finally we come full circle to Tom Waldron’s weighty, graceful, steel geometries. These pieces eschew color for a more naturalistic rust/black patina – but here the confusion of expectation comes through the forms. With gentle curving lines and soft bulging sides, these works skew the anticipation of perfect, rigid geometric forms: the cube twists and topples, the cone billows like a sail.

Each piece in Metal Mash Up has its own story, it’s unique vocabulary of form, material, color, theory. Yet together they create something new – a conversation that serves to highlight and showcase each artist’s distinctive vision in context and conviviality to the rest.

Channeling The Baroque: A Group Exhibition

Pard Morrison: Warp & Weft