”Calling a painting decorative used to be an insult, but I think it is profoundly radical”.

The subject of Ivan Morley’s A True Tale, 2006, is the personal profit of Peter Biggs, a Los Angeles ex-slave who, during the 19th century, “made a fortune shipping cats to San Francisco to help with their rat problem.” Tehachepi, 2006, is based on a Tehachepi Indian family who salvaged bullets out of the sides of trees to get by. Instead of depicting these historical anecdotes as literal accounts, these two works are imbued with the artist’s emotional and psychological responses through his use of dark, heavy colours and hand-stitched cloth.