Catamount Arts

Sunday, Feb. 15, 1-3pm

Catamount Arts Center, 115 Eastern Avenue, St Johnsbury

FREE (donations welcome)

While admission is free, please register to ensure you have a space.

Join 560 Railroad Community Artist JP Morrison Lans for a grown-up show and tell. Morrison Lans is conducting a research project on the power of everyday objects within our lives.

What is an Animistic Object?

Animism is the belief that all things - plants, rocks, rivers, handiwork, tools, toys, paintbrushes etc. - possess their own distinct psyche. When we apply this idea to everyday items we’ve collected or used, they become unique entities within our lives. Perhaps you have a family heirloom that holds the feeling of a dearly departed loved one. Maybe you’ve become attached to a tool that you have used for many years and shows its wear, or are still haunted by an item you lost years ago. Even a rock picked up on a hike that couldn't be put back down is a good example. Sometimes animistic objects can become insidious and contribute to hoarding tendencies (something the artist has dealt with within her own family). These items can be blessings or burdens and often both.

JP would love to have community members join her to share and discuss how certain objects have affected us. If you don’t have an object to bring because your chosen item is lost or inaccessible to you, please bring the story of your object. If time allows, we may play with some ideas of drawing or copying an item, to see if this amplifies or diminishes its power.

JP Morrison Lans is a Tulsa-based artist whose figurative work blends realism and abstraction to explore how the interior self processes the perplexities of the external world. Her paintings center her own body, family, and symbolic forms—hands, mouths, and inverted figures—as metaphors for desire, self-preservation, introspection, motherhood and recently the dark humor of middle-age womanhood. At age eleven, a visit to the Carole Laroche Gallery in Santa Fe ignited Morrison Lans’ desire to create an art practice, leading to her first solo exhibition at the Tulsa Artists’ Coalition in the year 2000. Since earning her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2007, she has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent solo shows in San Francisco and Santa Fe. Her work is held in public and private collections, including the Bundaberg Regional Gallery (Australia) and NBC Bank (Oklahoma). Morrison Lans has held residencies at the School of Visual Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Truro Art Center, and in Menorca, Spain; she is also a member of the international artist collective Teleportal.Gallery. Morrison Lans and her child can typically be found experimenting with encaustic and Lego, respectively, in their backyard studio.