
Vancouver
“Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry”
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
1825 Main Mall
University of British Columbia
January 13–April 8, 2012
Curated by Scott Watson and Michael Turner
Flickering in and out of fashion since the 1950s, concrete poetry offers a model of interdisciplinary practice that is emphatically transnational and transportable, linking artists and writers in far-flung locales. Vancouver emerged as an international art center during the 1960s, due in part to the efforts of Michael Morris, whose collaborative endeavorsfrom the Image Bank (an idea-exchange system via the postal service) to the artist-run space the Western Front Societyprefigured current interests in cross-media and networked practices. Featuring more than 150 examples of concrete poetry’s many formal manifestations, “Letters” situates roughly sixty works by Morrisincluding all eight of his large “Letter” paintingswith prints, ephemera, and books by Henri Chopin, Augusto de Campos, Kriwet, Jirí Kolár, Gerhard Rühm, and others (much of which is drawn from the Belkin’s extensive collection), along with a catalogue containing multiple essays and an interview with Morris.
— Liz Kotz