Intersecting Orbits: Michael Morris and Joan Balzar
January 27 - May 5, 2024
Curated by Lisa Baldissera and David MacWilliam
Opening Reception: Friday, January 26, 2024, 6:00-8:00PM
Joan Balzar (1928-2016) and Michael Morris (1942-2022) were foundational to the development of abstraction and conceptualism in British Columbia. To be within their orbit was to be part of a movement which shaped and internationalized regional visual art in the 1960s and 70s, and went on to become enduringly echoed and quoted. Intersecting Orbits presents works by both artists and from Morris’s collection and archive.
A generation apart in age, Balzar and Morris studied with the same painters (Jack Shadboldt, Joe Plaskett, Peter Aspell, Roy Kiyooka and Don Jarvis) at the Vancouver School of Art. They achieved early success in the later 1960s, with expansively scaled, hard-edge abstract paintings and later, their conceptual explorations. Morris oversaw an art collection that forms a personal, yet important legacy of overlapping histories in Western Canadian contemporary art.
In 1946, Morris emigrated from England to Saanichton, near Victoria, with his mother. He inherited her art collection, which was built on her friendships with influential Victoria artists. He brought Pop Art aesthetics and London’s energies of radical experimentation to Vancouver and later, among others, founded Image Bank, an international Mail Art repository, and the Vancouver artistic hub Western Front. Morris’s painting began to include new materials like Plexiglas and mirrors and, like fellow Fluxus artists, his art moved into photography, installation, video and performance.
Raised in Victoria, Balzar lived for extensive periods in South America, Mexico and Guatemala where her work was featured in major exhibitions. From the 1950s, she was fascinated by the atomic age and electronic communication, incorporating neon, aluminum and Plexiglas in her paintings. Combining dynamic neon paintings with more intimate works to reveal her tremendously visionary practice, this project situates Balzar as one of the most influential West Coast conceptual artists of the period.
Co-curated by Lisa Baldissera and David MacWilliam, Intersecting Orbits presents the art, archives and collections of Morris and Balzar to celebrate their converging influence on conceptualism on the West Coast. The exhibition features works from the collection of Rahmi Emin, Stephanie Edwards and Darrin Morrison, Shawn Macmillan, and Janice Haakons.
Image: Joan Balzar, Silver Scape, 1962-1965, chrome aluminum and acrylic on canvas, 53 x 90 in. Courtesy of Shawn Macmillan. Photo by Ken Dyck.
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