STEVE MORRISON 

When I was a young child, my uncle sent me a mysterious birthday gift. I believe it was the only thing he ever sent me, adding to its cryptic significance. This singular item he chose to bequeath upon me was a VHS tape entitled Dinosaurs and Other Strange Creatures. I watched this tape until it was worn out and wobbly, astonished by the stop-motion creatures fighting and dying before my eyes—in particular, a poignant scene featuring a giant ground sloth mauled by a saber-toothed tiger. 

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In this body of work, the sloth becomes the painter, a bewildered mascot for a medium of slowness and trying to learn how to adjust. It is the figure of the out-of-place and the desperate, too dim-witted and sluggish to adapt to a fast-paced, dynamically changing world. It is all of us as we awkwardly adapt our primitive paleolithic bodies and brains to navigate hyperreality and the Cloud. Its bulky bones lie under our feet today.

 

This poor lumbering beast captured my imagination, and over time this character has come to represent many things to me. Easier Prey delves into the relationship between the ancient past and the modern present, including animated landscapes—using the soil, leaves, and mud of the megatherium’s habitat to make living drawings in the earth itself.