Second and Third Year Lecturer Brian J Morrison’s recent solo exhibition was part of this year’s Belfast Photo Festival. His work Ripped Chiselled and Rock Hard is a photographic installation created through sourcing images from past issues of extreme bodybuilding publication Muscle and Fitness.

“Via the act of re-photographing, re-printing, enlarging, cutting, mounting and balancing, Morrison presents a selected number of photographs used in advertisements from Muscle and Fitness (1980 to 89) outside of their original visual context.  The cut-out images in Ripped, Chiselled and Rock Hard have not been manipulated and remain as they were found in their magazine, with no alterations made other than enlarging the image after tracing its outline and removing it from its background.With their subjects in a state of activity, ‘flex’ or ‘pump’, these representations seek to encourage the male viewer to admire the apparent physical strength, yet never lust after the sculpted body. This ideology is reinforced via another commonly used visual construction of hetero-masculinity, in which these bodies attain not only an identity but also become the possession of a female admirer”