A Deep Conversation With JP Morrison Lans At Positive Space

JP Morrison Lans decided to grow up to be an artist while visiting the Carole Laroche Gallery in Santa Fe New Mexico when she was eleven years old. Five years later the Tulsa Artist Coalition supported this dream for her when she was accepted for her first solo exhibition. Since then she has earned her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, co-owner a gallery, had her work purchased for the permanent collection of the Bundaberg Regional Gallery in Queensland Australia where she lived for two years and created immersive art installations for AHHA Tulsa, the Living Arts New Genre Festival, and the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition.  Morrison Lans has shows her work with M.A. Doran Gallery, Tulsa; Heron Arts, San Francisco; Keep Contemporary, Santa Fe; and 19 Karen, Gold Coast, Australia. She has been a resident artist at SVA, NY., Truro Art Center, MA., Rockland Woods, WA., the Vermont Studio Center and Quarantine in Menorca, Spain. Morrison Lans is a member of the international artist collective Teleportal.Gallery and is an inaugural member of the NYC Crit Club’s Canopy Program. She and her child can typically be found experimenting with encaustic and lego, respectively, from their home studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma.Statement:I explore the relationship of body and psyche by combining figurative realism, symbolic objects and intuitive abstraction. These collected elements are metaphors for my experience of womanhood, motherhood, love, loss, self-preservation, panic, desire, and knowing. Through layers of color pencil I create translucent skin. The addition of gouache and encaustic allows me to comb sheens and dimensional shapes around my drawing, forming membranes and isolated objects which express the subject's emotional escapades. Often I use orientation dissonance –the inversion of the figure– to symbolize circumspection, surrender, gestation, and metamorphosis. I render hands frequently, they represent intention and action, also the mouth, tongue and teeth as gateways between the inner self and outer world. Through taste and touch, we experience intimacy and desire. This anatomy creates boundaries while also being an entry point. My work invites you to experience this same push pull of entering and observing from a distance.