STEPHEN MORRISON

“The effect is both thoroughly contemporary and marvelously Baroque… Some may see these works as memento mori of sorts, but I think they signify a moment of more—more memories with a favorite companion, or with a favorite flower arrangement before it wilts.”

— Hrag Vartanian, Hyperallergic


SLAG&RX New York is pleased to present Dog Show #5: Field Recordings, Stephen Morrison’s first exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition presents a new body of work that extends Morrison’s ongoing investigation into the emotional and material textures of everyday life, reimagined through a canine lens.

Dogs, creatures of unguarded instinct, immediacy, and affect, serve in Morrison’s practice not merely as imagery but as a conceptual filter through which the familiar is rendered strange, tender, and critically charged. This strategy of “dogification” allows humor and absurdity to function as entry points into deeper examinations of habit, power, consumerism, and emotional economy. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, Morrison animates ordinary objects by endowing them with dog-like features and expressions. Domestic items, found materials, and quotidian detritus are transformed into precarious assemblages that oscillate between playfulness and unease. While the works initially present themselves as whimsical, their lightness is strategic: joy becomes a counterpoint to anxiety, and humor operates as a Trojan horse, inviting reflection on the structures, social, cultural, and psychological, that shape daily experience.

The paintings in Dog Show #5: Field Recordings were developed over the course of summer, fall, and winter and are anchored by three large-scale works associated with places that have profoundly shaped Morrison’s life and practice : Paris, New York City, and Maine. Each painting takes the form of a trompe l’oeil arrangement of symbolic objects set against site-specific grounds. Together, they function as a kind of visual archive or field record - an accumulation of observations, materials, and memories translated into painterly form.

For the Paris works, Morrison draws upon toile de jouy, a historically charged decorative textile associated with aristocratic ideals of pastoral life and myth. Using scans of original toile designs, he digitally alters figures, animals, and objects by introducing canine features, then recomposes them into a new pattern printed as the canvas itself. Painted atop this surface, objects sourced from Parisian flea markets and antique shops form a constellation that reflects Morrison’s ambivalent relationship to the city, its aesthetic seduction countered by a persistent sense of personal dislocation.

The New York painting shifts in both material and affect. Utilizing the ubiquitous green plywood paneling that covers the city’s construction sites, Morrison layers objects encountered over the course of an imagined day’s movement through the city. The composition suggests a precarious cascade of motion, inspired by the logic of fantastical and purposeless Rube Goldberg machines. Messier, more playful, and
more kinetic, the work mirrors the artist’s lived experience of New York as a place of immediacy, improvisation, and belonging.

The Maine paintings introduce a quieter, more introspective register and a materially intimate process. The three paintings from this series are executed on handmade quilt supports conceived by quilter Debbie Morrison, the artist’s mother. Over several weeks, they worked together selecting fabrics, determining specific bone patterns, and choosing personal objects from Morrison’s childhood, family textiles, early photographic tools, and cherished artifacts, that would inform the compositions. Morrison’s mother physically constructed the quilts, which replace traditional canvas or linen as the painting surface. The paintings themselves were subsequently fully painted by Stephen Morrison. Set within wintery, restrained compositions, these works evoke the stillness of Maine winters and the reflective distance of memory, carrying the weight of upbringing, lineage, and time passed.

Across Dog Show #5: Field Recordings, Morrison deploys humor not as escapism but as a critical methodology. By distorting the surface of the familiar through a canine lens, he creates a space in which joy, absurdity, and tenderness become tools for inquiry - inviting viewers to reconsider the emotional architectures of everyday life and the boundaries of what is typically regarded as mundane.
 

About the Artist

Stephen Morrison (b. 1991, Maine) is a painter and sculptor whose work playfully reimagines the ordinary through a distinct visual language centered on canine presence and form. He earned his BFA from Laguna College of Art and Design and further developed his practice through Yale Norfolk and the New York Studio Residency Program.
Morrison’s debut solo exhibition was held at The Invisible Dog Art Center in 2021. His work has since been presented in numerous group exhibitions, including shows at Hashimoto Contemporary, the Belger Arts Center, and the Bedford Gallery at the Lesher Center for the Arts. In 2023, Morrison presented a solo booth with The Invisible Dog Art Center at The Armory Show, followed by a solo exhibition at Hashimoto Contemporary, New York, in 2025. Stephen Morrison’s work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Creative Review, and BK Magazine, where critics have highlighted his inventive engagement with canine imagery and its emotional resonance in contemporary painting. He lives and works in Brooklyn,