Joe Morris

My practice is broadly concerned with cannibalism. Not in a literal sense, but rather in the same sense that critic Robert Hughes used it to describe the subjects explored in the work of Louise Bourgeois: violent acts of claiming power, of social domination and economic expropriation, as well as cultural exchanges and traumatic psychological relations in the evolving world. My painting The Parallax View is named after a film from 1974 by Alan J. Pakula and starring Warren Beatty.  Beatty plays a heavily-drinking journalist who attempts to uncover a plot by the Parallax Corporation to assassinate a politician. Parallax is also the term for the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions, and so, in my work, refers to the process of painting a photograph generally and specifically the imperfect symmetry and awkward synchronicity within the composition.