Joel Morrison: I’ll see you in Disneyland

The exhibition will feature five new sculptures and four large silk-screen and mixed-media works on paper. Culling imagery that ranges from Cinderella’s castle, The Beach Boys, Serena Williams, The Sex Pistols, Elvis, to Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed, Meghan Markle, Prince, NATO, and The Ramones, Morrison filters this bounty through his distinctive vision, a rapid-fire visual cornucopia that elides Southern California irreverence, art historian-accuracy and exquisite cultural savant. Morrison manipulates simple, easily recognizable symbols, objects, and images familiar from the world around us, deftly architecting them to create a spellbinding kaleidoscope of shifting meanings, where the collage becomes the object that engages the viewer in a mesmerizing tornado of thoughts, memories, and ideas. A razor blade walk through contemporary life, from politics to cancel culture, accompanied by the insistent musical earworms that soundtrack our experience, Morrison’s work prompts a conversation that pokes at the tenuous connections exacerbated by the experience of a global pandemic, dissecting, exploring and, occasionally, imploding them.

“This is West Coast Art,” says Morrison. “It links the idea of the simple and the fantastic with an aura of dangerous sophistication and complex misunderstanding.”