Steve Turner is pleased to present Acting Ordinary, a solo exhibition featuring recent paintings by Hannah Morris that incorporate reconstructed and collaged imagery clipped from the pages of popular American magazines from the 1940s through 1970s over which she paints with flat colors. Morris invents ambiguous narratives within everyday scenes (bus depot, hotel lobby, tea party, workplace) and populates them with people that are slightly off kilter with elongated torsos, large feet and small heads. The characters seem to be doing something, but they do not appear to be working together. According to Morris, it is important that she uses the actual material of history as the basis for an underpainting and that she follows her intuition to obscure and refashion it.
Hannah Morris (born 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 (2019 & 2021) 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. This is her first exhibition at Steve Turner.