Hannah Morris

Hannah Morris is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers on the deconstruction and reassembly of figures and environments sourced from photographic and printed imagery. Working through a series of personalized visual systems, she constructs layered collage underpaintings.. Drawing primarily from the 1940s through the 1970s, she selects images for their color, gesture, composition, and contextual resonance, fragmenting and re-contextualizing them to create unexpected visual narratives that inhabit spaces both familiar and surreal.

Morris is particularly interested in the cultural narratives embedded in popular media. The representations of gender, race, and class found in advertisements and editorial imagery provide a lens through which she examines American cultural history, including her own relationship to it. These fragments become raw material for compositions that question, reinterpret, and sometimes subvert the visual conventions and social values of their time.

Her work explores the tensions between vulnerability, alienation, and human connection, examining the ways individuals and their surroundings intersect, coexist, and connect. Using paint as both an editing tool and a unifying element, Morris works directly onto her collages, flattening, distilling, and refining disparate images into cohesive compositions.

Figures, architecture, animals, and urban and natural landscapes occupy an unsettled yet strangely harmonious space in her work. Awkward, off-kilter, and occasionally absurd, these elements maintain an unexpected organic rhythm. The resulting scenes evoke a kind of suspended choreography, in which gestures and interactions are frozen in time and the boundaries between the ordinary and the surreal begin to dissolve.

Morris invites viewers into an ambiguous visual world where the familiar becomes unfamiliar and meaning remains open to interpretation. At its core, her work considers the complex and often contradictory nature of human interconnectedness.