Brandon Morrison “Iblet”: Excavations and Improvisations
We are pleased to welcome Atlanta-based artist Brandon Morrison, known as “Iblet,” back to Mirrorball Gallery for Excavations and Improvisations, a solo exhibition featuring a dynamic new body of work.
The exhibition opens Thursday, September 18, at 6 p.m. and remains on view through October 25, 2026. Morrison will join us for the opening reception, offering guests an opportunity to meet the artist, discuss the new work, and gain insight into the ideas and processes driving his practice.
Excavation Meets Improvisation
The title Excavations and Improvisations gets straight to the heart of Morrison’s approach.
“Excavations” suggests recovery—the act of digging beneath surfaces, uncovering layers, and revealing what has been buried or obscured. “Improvisations” introduces another energy: rhythm, instinct, spontaneity, experimentation, and the unexpected.
Together, these ideas describe a visual language shaped through accumulation, interruption, revision, and discovery. Morrison’s paintings do not simply present an image. They build one, dismantle it, and construct it again.
Throughout the exhibition, figures, gestures, symbols, and geometric forms hover between recognition and abstraction. Some works reference musicians, yet Morrison sidesteps conventional portraiture. Faces and bodies fracture, overlap, and dissolve into larger compositions.
The result feels less like a portrait of a musician and more like the visual equivalent of music itself—rhythmic, layered, fragmented, improvised, and alive.
When Painting Begins to Sound Like Music
Music is fundamental to Morrison’s sense of composition. Visual elements repeat, disappear, return, and mutate, creating rhythms across the picture plane.
A gesture echoes elsewhere. A shape becomes a motif. A field of color interrupts a figure. Lines collide with planes. The eye moves through the work much as it might move through a piece of music.
This relationship between sound and image gives the paintings an improvisational quality while preserving a strong underlying structure.
Morrison’s newest work also pushes further into architecture and urban space. Hard edges, layered planes, grids, lines, and partially concealed forms suggest walls, façades, scaffolding, floor plans, and fragments of the built environment.
These are not literal architectural studies. Instead, Morrison creates spaces that feel simultaneously constructed and eroded—as though multiple histories, memories, and moments have been compressed into a single surface.
Between Structure and Accident
Working across painting, drawing, collage, and found materials, Morrison embraces the friction between intention and accident.
Automatic drawing and gestural mark-making coexist with flat fields of color, geometric structures, layered imagery, and carefully considered compositions. That tension keeps the work moving between representation and abstraction.
The paintings carry recognizable influences, including Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, and Romare Bearden, alongside the broader visual languages of Abstract Expressionism, graffiti, print culture, music, and contemporary urban life.
Morrison is not interested in simply revisiting those histories. He treats them as ingredients within an evolving visual vocabulary distinctly his own.
The Canvas as an Active Site
In Excavations and Improvisations, the canvas becomes less a finished picture and more an active site of accumulation, disruption, and revision.
What initially appears to be a single image may reveal another beneath it. A figure emerges from abstraction. A geometric form begins to resemble architecture. A familiar gesture transforms into something else entirely.
The work rewards repeated looking. With each encounter, another trace surfaces—something covered, altered, interrupted, or rediscovered.
That sense of discovery is central to Morrison’s practice. For us, it makes Excavations and Improvisations more than an exhibition of new paintings. It is an invitation to look beneath the surface and consider how memory, music, place, identity, and visual history accumulate over time.
We are proud to present an exhibition that reflects Mirrorball Gallery’s commitment to contemporary art and craft that encourages sustained looking, meaningful conversation, and discovery. We look forward to welcoming Morrison back to Tryon and sharing this compelling new body of work with our community.
Brandon Morrison “Iblet”: Excavations and Improvisations
Opening Reception: September 18, 2026, at 6 p.m.
Exhibition Dates: September 18–October 25, 2026
Location: Mirrorball Gallery, Tryon, North Carolina
Mediums: Painting, drawing, collage, and found materials
Brandon Morrison will be in attendance at the opening reception.
