Still Lifes, Shifting Narratives: The Hyperrealistic Paintings of Sharon Harms

July 25 – October 22, 2026 | Bruner & Orgain Galleries

In the hands of Nashville-based artist Sharon Harms, the still life genre becomes anything but settled. In Still Lifes, Shifting Narratives , Harms presents a body of work that honors the still life tradition while reimagining its purpose by transforming the arranged object from passive subject into active narrator. The things Harms selects — anatomical models, vintage toys, typewriters, glass figurines, advertising ephemera — function simultaneously as personal relics and cultural artifacts, evoking individual memory and collective experience at once. They are chosen intuitively, not for their decorative potential but for their symbolic resonance and their capacity to mean more than they appear. The result is a body of work in which the still life is not an endpoint but a doorway to a space where the viewer is invited to complete the story. In this, Harms adds to the genre’s long conversation with storytelling through the symbolism inherent in inanimate objects. Her paintings ask what it means to arrange objects with such exacting care, and what those arrangements quietly confess. The answer is that nothing in her work is simply still.