Brandon Morrison “Iblet” Brings Music, Memory and Urban Energy to Mirrorball Gallery

Mirrorball Gallery in Tryon, North Carolina, presents Excavations and Improvisations, a solo exhibition of new work by Atlanta-based artist Brandon Morrison, known as “Iblet.” Opening September 18 at 6 p.m. and on view through October 25, 2026, the exhibition marks Morrison’s return to Mirrorball Gallery with a dynamic new body of work exploring the collision of figuration, abstraction, music, memory, architecture, and urban culture.

Morrison will be present for the opening reception, giving 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” speaks to 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, the words describe a visual language built through accumulation, interruption, revision, and discovery.

Morrison’s paintings don't simply present an image. They build one, dismantle it, and rebuild it again.

Across the exhibition, figures, gestures, symbols, and geometric forms hover between recognition and abstraction. Some works reference musicians, but Morrison sidesteps conventional portraiture. Instead of delivering literal likenesses, 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 Starts 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 might echo elsewhere. A shape becomes a motif. A field of color interrupts a figure. Lines collide with planes. The eye moves through the work almost as it would move through a piece of music.

That relationship between sound and image gives the paintings an improvisational quality while maintaining a strong underlying structure.

Morrison’s newest work also pushes further into architecture and urban space. Hard edges, layered planes, lines, grids, and partially concealed forms suggest walls, façades, scaffolding, floorplans, and fragments of the built environment.

But these aren't literal architectural studies.

Instead, Morrison creates spaces that feel simultaneously constructed and eroded—as if 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. The tension keeps the work moving between representation and abstraction.

There are recognizable influences in the mix, 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.

But Morrison isn't interested in simply revisiting those histories. He uses them as ingredients in an evolving visual vocabulary of 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 can reveal another beneath it. A figure emerges from abstraction. A geometric form begins to resemble architecture. A familiar gesture becomes something else entirely.

The work rewards repeated looking.

With each pass, another trace surfaces—something covered, altered, interrupted, or rediscovered.

That sense of discovery is central to Morrison’s practice and 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.

See Excavations and Improvisations at Mirrorball Gallery

Excavations and Improvisations continues Mirrorball Gallery’s commitment to contemporary art and craft that encourages sustained looking, conversation, and discovery.

For Tryon’s increasingly active arts community, the exhibition adds another layer to the town’s growing cultural conversation while bringing the work of an Atlanta-based contemporary artist to a North Carolina audience.

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
Artist: Brandon Morrison “Iblet”
Mediums: Painting, drawing, collage, found materials

Morrison will be in attendance at the opening reception.

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