Collection: All Power To The Animal, Selected By Steve Morrison (online exhibition)

About the exhibition

"After the celebratory title image on Dorrie Reid's gorgeous quilt, the exhibition begins with the image of a great turtle shell--protecting and enclosing the soft, vulnerable (unseen) animal body inside. Jeremy Burleson's fantastical turtle is a grid erupting with flame. The rest of the images in the exhibition break through the rigidity of the grid/shell and allow us to see the intimacy of the soft, squishy pliable body hidden within. Moving through the exhibition, geometry becomes organic as life courses through these objects. We see animals literal and figurative, always emphasizing physicality, gravity, and embodiment until the show itself dissolves away in the sticky ethereal pollen of life itself.

Inside, each of us is a vulnerable animal and our vulnerability can become something to celebrate rather than pure weakness. Embrace that wild softness. All power to the animal!"

About the selector

Steve Morrison received his BFA (Illustration) in 2006, and his MFA (Painting) in 2015.  His studio practice explores transformations and breaks between evolving forms, creating cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration. Much of his work deals with overlapping scales of time—the rise and fall of mountain ranges, species, civilizations, loaves of bread dough, and breathing lungs become the same movement performed at different scales. Using paint, animation, digital processes, and sculpture, his art enacts a tragicomic theater of impermanence.

Morrison is a 2018-19 MINT Leap Year Residency Artist. He received a grant from Idea Capital in 2017, and was awarded a Walthall Fellowship by WonderRoot in 2016-2017 (curated by Sarah Higgins of the Zuckerman Museum of Art). In 2015, he was a finalist for the Working Artist Project (MOCA-GA), curated by Siri Engberg of the Walker Art Center. He has received several grants from the Center For Puppetry Arts. 

Steve Morrison is a professor at the University of West Georgia. He lives in Atlanta.