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.        

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.

Published in conjunction with Black Dog Publishing, UK, this richly illustrated book includes critical essays on concrete poetry and Michael Morris, featuring a chronology of Morris’s prolific practice from the mid-1960s onwards. 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 inserted 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 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.

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.