Jim Morris creates energetic black-and-white compositions through a unique process that translates the visual language of various technical diagrams into layered drawings of ink on mylar. Morris’s chosen diagrams range from city plans and architectural drawings to medical documents, population and geographical data, maps, border documentation, and more. All diagrammatic configurations lend potential to the scrutiny of Morris’s process.
Morris overlays the extracted shapes by attaching a reminder of circumstance, which stops just short of providing a direct reference. This tension evokes an anxious feeling between familiar traces of static shapes and the frantic, loose movement of more elusive markings. The result imbues forms with the chaos of organic activity found in their origin.
The purposeful stillness of diagrammatic documentation is a reduction of the actual activity being documented. The full context is too messy to distill into functional clarity. Data collection leaves information missing; Morris fills in this absence and simultaneously abstracts it from its direct reference. The resulting drawings embody an environment inhabited by dense movement.
