Chris Morgan

" Surreal Landscape "

Inherent in the photographic medium is a sense of the surreal.

This is what allows me to use photography to as an experimental medium to explore forms and shapes in beach driftwood as surreal forms in the landscape. A surreal photographic process in landscape deliberately plays on our sense of seeing, but incorporates representative imagery that suggests uncanny, sometimes elusive imagery of dreams, myth, and fantasy. My entry into the Dada Muse Art Prize explores the notion of static, frozen time as a transparent mask over the statue'ing of ephemeral prehistoric life forms in Huon Pine driftwood found on a beach on the West Coast of Tasmania.

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

 

I successfully completed a Fine Art Degree in 1978.I commenced a Fine Art Post Graduate Master's Degree (UTAS) in 2009. In 2012 I was awarded a Master of Fine Art. Since the Masters, worked on a photographic alignment between mythology and things that are structural – of what is mixed-up and folded within in the landscape over time by natural forces - and the subsequent patterns, lines, shapes and colours that emerge. I use this as a basis for storytelling. Over the past five years, I have spent much time in the Tarkine area of Tasmania. I endeavour to explore the ever-shifting folds and curves of this rugged West Coast landscape. I have been a Tidal finalist in 2020 and 2022, I have also exhibited art works of this nature twice in subsequent Northern Exposure Group Art Shows at Poimena Gallery / Launceston Church Grammar School in 2020 and 2022, also as a finalist in the Bay of Fires Art Prize in 2023 and 2024.