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Image Bank

2019 / ISBN 978-3-7757-4632-8
320 pages, colour, paperback, published with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; with European distribution by Hatje Cantz

$50
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Exhibition catalogue from Image Bank at the Belkin (18 June-22 August 2021) with writing by AA Bronson, Zanna Gilbert, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Angie Keefer, Maxine Kopsa, Hadrien Laroche, Gary Lee-Nova, Michael Morris, Felicity Tayler, Vincent Trasov and Scott Watson. Image Bank explores the artistic collaboration of Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov and originally Gary Lee-Nova, including their most spectacular works – extended performances with props, such as Colour Bar Research (1970-78) and Mr. Peanut’s mayoralty campaign (1974) in which Vincent Trasov as Mr. Peanut ran for mayor of Vancouver – alongside their extensive mail-art exchanges with other networkers such as Robert Filliou, General Idea, Ant Farm and Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School. The catalogue is published on the occasion of the Image Bank exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (June 22-September 1, 2019) and the Belkin (January to April 2021), curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen, Maxine Kopsa and Scott Watson. Critical essays explore the compelling history of Image Bank and the mail-art network in which they performed: Hadrien Laroche revisits Babyland, an important rural “set” for Image Bank performances; Felicity Tayler examines the artists’ directories as a new form of kinship and community; Zanna Gilbert considers Image Bank’s postcard exhibition in the context of mail-art exhibitions; AA Bronson’s important text “Pablum for the Pablum Eaters” is reprinted from General Idea’s FILE Megazine; Angie Keefer writes of how we might think about networks in general; and co-curator Scott Watson defines the beginning and end of Image Bank and its legacy both locally and internationally. Interviews with the artists Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov and Gary Lee-Nova provide insight into the personalities of Image Bank. Through words and images, Image Bank reflects on a period of optimism where artists envisioned a non-hierarchical alternative to the world of art galleries and museums, where images and ideas could be freely exchanged through the international postal system thereby creating an open-ended and decentralized method of networking that presages social media.

  • Michael Morris

    Michael Morris (1942-2022) was a painter, photographer, video and performance artist and curator. His work is often media based and collaborative, involved with developing networks and in the production and presentation of new art activity. In his roles as curator and, primarily, as an artist, Morris was a key figure of the West Coast art scene during the 1960s. Morris studied at the University of Victoria and then at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University), followed by graduate studies at Slade School of Fine Art at the University College London, during the 1960s. There he became interested in the work of Fluxus and the European avant-garde, which had a profound influence on his work and on the Vancouver experimental art scene in general. In 1969 he founded Image Bank with Vincent Trasov, a system of postal correspondence between participating artists for the exchange of information and ideas. The intention of Image Bank was to create a collaborative, process-based project in the hopes of engendering a shared creative consciousness—in opposition to the alienation endemic to modern capitalist society—through the deconstruction and recombination of its ideological forms. Morris was acting curator of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Centre for Communications and the Arts at Simon Fraser University and has had many guest curatorships at other institutions. In 1973, he co-founded the Western Front—one of Canada’s first artist-run centres—and served as co-director for seven years. In 1990 he and Trasov founded the Morris/Trasov Archive, housed at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, to research contemporary art. He has established a strong international reputation and worked for many years in Berlin. Morris has participated in artist-in-residence programs both in Canada at the Banff Centre (1990) and at Open Studio (2003) and internationally at Berlin Kustlerprogramm (1981-1998). Morris has had numerous solo and collaborative exhibitions nationally and internationally, and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2015 Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Visual Arts, the 2011 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and an Honorary Doctorate in 2005 by Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

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  • Vincent Trasov

    An important Canadian conceptual artist and a leader in the avant-garde community, Vincent Trasov (b. 1947, Edmonton, AB) is a painter, video and performance artist. His work is often media-based and collaborative in spirit, involved with developing networks. In 1969 he founded Image Bank with Michael Morris, a method for personal exchange of information amongst artists. Trasov has made videotapes since 1971. In 1973, Trasov co-founded and co-directed the Western Front Society, an artist-run centre for the production and presentation of new art activity. Trasov gained international prominence with his performance as Mr. Peanut (in a Planter’s Peanut costume), an official candidate for Mayor of Vancouver in 1974. The Mr. Peanut role was intended as, amongst other things, a commentary about the perceived merging of art and politics. In 1981, he was invited to Berlin with Michael Morris as guest of Berliner Kunstlerprogramm, DAAD. He and Morris founded the Morris/Trasov Archive in 1990, housed at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, to research contemporary art and communication. Trasov has had numerous international exhibitions and is represented in public and private collections in both Europe and North America. He presently lives in Berlin and Vancouver.

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  • Scott Watson

    Scott Watson (Canadian, b. 1950) is Director Emeritus and Research Fellow at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia. A curator whose career has spanned more than thirty-five years, Watson is internationally recognized for his research and work in curatorial and exhibition studies, contemporary art and issues, and art theory and criticism. His distinctions include the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2010); the Alvin Balkind Award for Creative Curatorship in BC Arts (2008) and the UBC Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance Development in the Visual and Performing Arts (2005). Watson has published extensively in the areas of contemporary Canadian and international art. His 1990 monograph on Jack Shadbolt earned the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1991. Recent publications include Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry (2015); Thrown: British Columbia’s Apprentices of Bernard Leach and their Contemporaries (2011), a finalist for the 2012 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize; “Race, Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape” and “Disfigured Nature” (in Beyond Wilderness, McGill University Press, 2007); and “Transmission Difficulties: Vancouver Painting in the 1960s” (in Paint, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006).

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Related

  • Exhibition

    18 Jun – 22 Aug 2021

    Image Bank

    Image Bank explores the artistic collaboration of Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov with others, including their most spectacular works – extended performances with props, such as Colour Bar Research (1970-78) and Mr. Peanut’s mayoralty campaign (1974) – alongside their extensive mail-art exchanges with other networkers such as Robert Filliou, Ant Farm and Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School. The Peanut campaign, in which Vincent Trasov as Mr. Peanut ran for mayor of Vancouver, mobilized the artists associated with the newly founded artist-run centre, the Western Front (est. 1973) and the exhibition includes many collaborations with and amongst these artists (Martin Bartlett, Hank Bull, Kate Craig, General Idea, Gary Lee-Nova, Glenn Lewis, Eric Metcalfe, John Mitchell and others). The exhibition pulls films, photographs, drawings, collages and other ephemera from the Belkin’s Morris/Trasov Archive to track the collaborative history of Image Bank. Founded in 1970 and lasting to 1978, Image Bank was a project initiated by Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov and Gary Lee-Nova that originated when they were all associated with the legendary Vancouver artist-run centre Intermedia. The exhibition reflects on a period of optimism where artists envisioned a non-hierarchical alternative to the world of art galleries and museums, where images and ideas could be freely exchanged through the international postal system thereby creating an open-ended and decentralized method of networking that presages social media.        

    [more]
  • News

    17 Apr 2019

    Image Bank at KW Institute, Berlin

    This June 2019, a retrospective exhibition of the work of Image Bank opens at KW Institute in Berlin. Co-curated by the Belkin’s Scott Watson with Krist Gruijthuijsen and Maxine Kopsa, the exhibition pulls films, photographs, drawings, collages and other ephemera from the Gallery’s Morris/Trasov Archive to track the collaborative history of Image Bank. Founded in 1970 and lasting to 1978, Image Bank was a project initiated by Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov and Gary Lee-Nova that originated when they were all associated with the legendary Vancouver artist-run centre Intermedia. Image Bank produced a myriad of projects, including extended performances with props, such as Colour Bar Research, which involved 2,000 painted wooden bars that could be arranged into an ever-changing painting. Their most known performance is the Mr. Peanut for Mayor Campaign (1974) in which Vincent Trasov, as Mr. Peanut, ran for Mayor of Vancouver. This artistic collaboration and archive helped facilitate the exchange of ideas, images and information between artists through the use of the international postal system, thereby creating an open-ended and decentralized method of networking that presages social media.

    [more]
  • Event

    12 Dec 2016, 2-4 pm

    Catalogue Launch: Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry

    Join us in celebrating the publication of Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry, co-published with Black Dog Publishing, UK. This richly illustrated book includes essays by Jamie Hilder, David MacWilliam, Michael Turner, Scott Watson and William Wood, and features a chronology of Morris’s prolific practice since the mid-1960s. It follows the 2012 exhibition of the same name that was held at the Belkin Art Gallery, which focused on a series of large-scale paintings with inset mirrors that Morris made in 1969—his last paintings until the early 1980s—brought together at the Belkin for the first time since then. The Belkin’s show presented the paintings in the context of contemporaneous examples of Concrete Poetry, a practice that had influenced Morris and catalyzed his move into other forms of art making such as sculpture, photography and performance, examples of which were also represented in the exhibition. This book focuses on Morris’s activity in the late 1960s and his “last paintings,” in an attempt to restore them to an art historical context. Michael Morris and exhibition co-curator and editor Scott Watson will be in attendance. Special launch pricing will be in effect.

    [more]
  • Exhibition

    13 January 2012 – 8 April 2012

    Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry

    In his roles as a curator and primarily as an artist, Michael Morris has been a key figure of the west coast art scene since the 1960s and his contribution to the development of Vancouver as a contemporary art city has been immense. Morris was engaged with Concrete Poetry in the 1960s. The Concrete Poetry movement was perhaps the first global art movement, springing up in South and North America, Japan and Europe in the mid to late 1950s.

    [more]
  • Exhibition

    25 January 2012 – 3 March 2012

    Michael Morris: Palomar

    Michael Morris has been a key figure of the west coast art scene since the 1960s, and his contribution to the development of Vancouver as an important city for contemporary art has been immense. Satellite Gallery presents Palomar: Michael Morris, an exhibition of work by Morris that complements his larger exhibition at the Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry.

    [more]
  • Event

    18 Jun - 22 Aug 2021

    Image Bank: Image Request List 2021

    The International Image Exchange Directory (1972) and the Image Request Lists published in General Idea’s FILE Megazine (1974) are Image Bank’s most consequential works in the eyes of Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov. These directories established an international network for the exchange of mail as artworks.

    [more]

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

University of British Columbia

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xʷməθkʷəy̍əm | Musqueam Territory

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