06.12.1997 | 18.01.1998
MOAT | REGAN MORRIS

This recent series of paintings by Toronto artist Regan Morris marks a significant departure in the artist's career. Brighter in colour and somewhat smaller and more intimate that his previous work, each 15-inch canvas contains a single, playful image or motif embedded in its centre. Morris applied paint and caulking to bed sheets and gauze in order to create a multilayered effect of physical distress and decay. In Moat, the paintings are hung in a horizontal ring around the gallery walls, evoking the circular path of our memory and the fragile recollections that weather age and evaporate over time. At once elegant, poetic, and darkly humorous, Morris’ paintings are full of images of childhood (his own was spent in Rhodesia), loss, identity, mortality, and entropy.

Organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery with funding assistance from the Canada Council.