Since my early childhood, I have used limitations to inspire and propel my creativity. As an artist, my visual storytelling is based on personalized design systems. I construct underpaintings out of collage in a highly selective process: I sift through mainstream lifestyle, craft, humorous, and news magazines from (roughly) the 1940s through 1970s, looking for colors, gestures, and contexts that strike me. The gender, race, and class norms portrayed in advertisements and stories invite interrogation as I explore my own American cultural history.
Working intuitively, I deconstruct and re-construct figures and scenes from the magazine photographs to re-contextualize, curate, and rearrange cultural material into new narratives set in ordinary scenes. Using paint as my editing tool, I work on top of the collages to flatten and distill the scene down to its focal point, creating a united scene out of fractured elements. My figures, buildings, animals, and urban and wild landscapes are inherently off-kilter and awkward — pieced together from fragments and scraps. I hope the vulnerability revealed inspires the viewer to connect with what they see. Using formal means (shading and perspective, primarily) I encourage the viewer pause and enter into the visual space — to believe the absurd, the unlikely, the ambiguous — and then to construct their own personal narrative. By capturing a moment of action and interaction in a kind of frozen, surreal choreography, I am exploring what it means to be complicatedly inter-connected.
Hannah Morris (b. 1974, Bennington, Vermont) earned a BA at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine (1996) and an MA at Stellenbosch University, South Africa (2007). She has had solo exhibitions at Northern Daughters Gallery, Vergennes, Vermont, Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, California, and the Brattleboro Museum & Arts Center, Brattleboro, Vermont, and has had her work included in group exhibitions in South Africa and the United States since 2007. Morris lives and works in Barre, Vermont.