Pard Morrison

Pard Morrison creates miniature and large-scale geometric paintings using a palette that is at once commonplace and unique to his work. He calls his paintings “mutations,” a clever title for work that initially appears quite rational. “I hope to create work that upon first encounter primarily reads as artificially fabricated, but upon further investigation, the visual strength of its own ‘objectness is compromised by specific human mark making. They have a familiar materiality and shape but also display attributes that are somewhat unnameable, visually discordant—nonspecific.” Morrison’s aluminum fabrications, appearing both solid and apparitional at once, are based on a rational, geometric foundation, with the use of color to denote depth and space. He describes his work as “momentary portraits of systems that are in flux,” with the likeness to something engineered and purposeful displaced by the viewer’s awareness that optical perception plays a key role in how an object is recognized. Morrison explains, “My interest lies in the exploration of this intersection: the intersection of pictorial illusion and specific object, and the marriage of both. . . . This visual language of specific geometric gesture simultaneously establishes compositional form and at the same time visually destroys the specific object that it is applied upon.”
Morrison was born in Colorado Springs in 1975 and graduated with a BFA from Colorado State University. He has had solo exhibitions in Dallas, Santa Fe, San Francisco, Denver, and New Orleans and has been included in group shows all over the United States and abroad. Two of Morrison’s works were displayed in Lannan Foundation’s 2016 show (Infra) Structure.