Remembering Michael Morris

The Vancouver Art Gallery was saddened to learn of the recent passing of Michael Morris, a prolific artist, curator, organizer and performer who was a key figure in Vancouver’s experimental art scene in the 1960s, during which time he was also known by his alias, Marcel Dot. From his role as Acting Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1966 to his iconic turn as “Miss General Idea” in 1971 and his co-founding of the Western Front, Morris played a significant role in the development of Vancouver as an internationally-recognized art centre. His collaborative nature, enduring inventiveness and support for other artists made him central to Vancouver’s art community for more than 50 years.

While he is well known for the precise abstract paintings he created from the 1960s to the mid-1970s that infuse a Pop aesthetic with the legacies of performance and conceptual art, his multi-disciplinary practice extends to photography, performance, text and video work that is often collaborative in nature. In 1969, he founded Image Bank with Vincent Trasov and Gary Lee-Nova, which participated in an international exchange of ideas, images and information through mail art networks, and in 1973, he helped co-found and became co-director of Western Front Society, one of Canada’s first artist run centres dedicated to the production and presentation of contemporary art.

The Gallery holds more than 80 works by Morris in our permanent collection and has included him in numerous exhibitions including a show with Lee-Nova in 1960 and a solo exhibition in 1986. The work on display here reveals Morris’ experimentation with silkscreen printing, embracing the medium’s bold, flat colours and simple techniques. Motown is an example of Morris’ use of thin bands of precise colour to form stripe patterns and is evidence of his strong design sense and interest in music and film.