Holly Murray’s Pharmakon

Holly Murray’s Pharmakon


Holly Murray’s challenging aesthetic falls within the tradition of art as direct social commentary and consciousness-raising.  These important topics are conveyed in paintings that are pastiches of repetitive mythic and contemporary iconic images rendered in organic colors embodying ample content for deep reading.

Murray concerns are ambitious and compassionate.  Her topics range from a critique of the banality of middle-class consumption, to a chilling depiction of domestic violence, to revealing the complications of biological engineering, to the invasiveness of commercially based science. Murray’s work is a welcome counter-propaganda to the banal and unreflective images offered by the media that we numbly count as information.  Her work is educational in the best sense.

To prosecute her case, Murray appropriates the tropes of propaganda in her paintings.  Her choice of this mode of expression successfully summons our unreflective trust.  In her next move, Murray subverts that comfort as we read the challenging content she offers. In this way she shakes us from our complacency and demands we be reflective and critical.

In surveying her opus[body] of work and its many themes, one topic persists: invasiveness.  Invasiveness comes in many forms in Murray’s work: bodily, culturally, and psychologically. This invasiveness can be found in Murray’s themes such as: how marketing has cannibalized family values, how violence invades the home, how both disease and genetic engineering enter and alter our bodies, and how species march into other species’ domains both malevolently and beneficially.  Her two most recent shows “Good Breeding” and “Swarming Bees” have solidified her approach to deconstructing and exploring this theme.

Good Breeding
“Good Breeding,” completed in 2003, presents the viewer with seventeen paintings that depict the benefits and costs of bioengineering.  The title is a pun on the instrumentality of genetically managed breeding by science, and the notion of social class and privilege that is reflected in “good breeding.”  Before the content of the paintings is fully cognized, we are transported to an innocent state.  The difficult topics are rendered in a visual imagery that is reminiscent of educational and propaganda posters.  The paintings are replete with simple two-dimensional images, repetitive icons, and soft colors.  Murray uses repeated images in the fashion of Warholian commercialism and the icons of Asian religious art.  Warhol numbs us into submission with the appropriated repetitive images of the familiar; Asian art reifies the holy with its formal repetition of images.  Murray is aware of how repetition and integration of images count as simulating knowledge and authority.  Her icons (diagrams of brains, Siamese twins, streptococcus-like strands of germs, milk bottles, clouds, bull horns) populate numerous paintings integrating her theme and exploring its facets.  This repetition emulates the methods of propaganda as well diffusing such images among her paintings mimicking the mechanism of genetic transmission.

The sum of these affects is imagery that is nostalgic and elicits a childlike trust.  Yet, as the content emerges each painting speaks to a complex concern about manipulation, gestation, uncertainty, and the monstrous.  Murray’s work gently invites us in, and then dismantles our trust and quiescence.  She manipulates us in the same manner of those she accuses of duping us, and in so doing reveals their methods and our gullibility and latent desire for authority.

For example, Murray uses the repeated image of conjoined twins among numerous paintings in this work. In the piece, “Life in Bottle,” an image of the twin is initially confusing as one of the conjoined twins is diminutive.  There is an initial bewilderment as to whether the image is of a mother with child, or a conjoined twin.  We are lead to the warm feeling of motherhood, and then this archetype is subverted by the revulsion and sadness as we recognize the conjoined twins.

Murray does not stop here: in a subsequent piece she mixes this image with allusions to cancer. An image of a crab is juxtaposed with the conjoined twin in “A Very Brief History” (the crab is the astrological symbol for the sign Cancer).  Now the child/conjoined twin is interpretable as a cancerous growth. This confusion and conflation of imagery leaves us pondering about archaic ideas of destiny and luck in conjunction with contemporary notions of genetics and randomness.  As with all substantial works of art, our perception evolves and surprises us with continued viewing.

This puzzlement about the identity of the twins highlights Murray’s concern with the two outcomes of experimental science: success and error.  Murray sees science promoting itself to the public with rhetoric designed to evoke our trust.  Science highlights its successes: science is knowing and certain and progressive.  Murray reminds us that the scientific project has, in fact, ample uncertainty, errors, and difficult ethical and philosophical issues.

This uncertainty is depicted in her painting “Jumping Cows.” The work shows a collection of milk containers containing genetically modified material. With bottles in the foreground Murray depicts cows in the background in the style of Paleolithic cave paintings: in this way she indicates that our genetic experiments have us tampering with an ancient process. We do this at our risk. Murray questions the innovation of genetically modified foods and the rush to market.  Will this innovation follow the same fate as tobacco and thalidomide?  In reality such products turned out to be massive experiments with tragic results.  She reminds us that we often lack awareness and immunity from such experiments.

The claim of science is that its mission it to establish order amongst the chaos in nature.  Murray’s work highlights that the validity of this claim is inherently uncertain.  We cannot know all the implications of what we do.  We cannot fully know our destiny.  We do not fully know what we are doing. Thus the attempt to contain chaos is a double-edged sword.  With the safety comes emerges another problem.  Murray feels these risks are repressed and is compelled to bring them to the foreground.

Swarming Bees
Murray’s most recent body of work, “Swarming Bees” explores possible solutions to the competing issues of individuality and cooperation in this complex era.  Bees “swarm” when the hive grows too large to be effective; they need to divide and start another hive.  They need to migrate to another location.  It is a cooperative strategy for growth in this insect society.  The swarming raises questions about migration, cooperation, and ecological integration.

This body of work contains twelve pieces, again integrated with repeating icons among the paintings.   Murray employs the bee as a symbol of ecological integration with nature.  The bee symbiotically traverses among floral species pollinating them to the plants’ benefit and also yielding fruit and vegetables to humans and other fauna, not to mention the production of succulent honey.  The bee is idealized as an exemplar of social cooperation and natural assimilation.  Her images allude to the bee’s beneficial invasiveness with flowers as juxtaposed with a skeptical view of the invasive of the commercial deployment of scientific knowledge that marks her show “Good Breeding.”

Numerous paintings in this opus appear as engineering signs. For example, in the piece “It’s For Your Own Good: II” the hexagons of the hive appear in numerous paintings, annotated with the draftsman-like marks of an engineering schematic.  These signs are indicative of the possibility of knowledge we need to manage our world.

Given the theme of swarming for the sake of survival, Murray focuses on images of the queen bee’s reproductive organs in the piece “The Queen Rules.” This is a basic image of survival: the perpetuation of the species.  The images are blood red in color and rendered in the fashion of an illustration in a science textbook.  The reproductive organs are dissected from the queen bee for our examination.  Murray’s appropriation of signs from science and engineering in this body of work suggests the possibility  of knowledge of some sort, as well as portending a meta-narrative that could explain our complex world.  This contrasts to “Good Breeding” that was [is] skeptical of such knowledge.

One of the most interesting pieces in this collection is “The Gift II.”  This painting shows Hindu- like deities of the Balinese variety with satyr-like legs summoning a gigantic bee in a seeming act of respect and sacrifice. The juxtaposition of the ethereal Asian deity with earthy Grecian satyr-like legs and hooves is, in itself, a compelling image of the marriage of heaven and earth, of the abstract and the concrete, of the East with the West.  The deity and the bee are in harmony, transacting some matter of mutual concern.  The image is rendered in gold with repetitive cloud images (used in a number of the pieces in this opus of work), harkening to the recurring motifs used in Tibetan thangkas.  This image nicely expresses Murray’s integrative and hopeful impulse, now inter-special, with both species equal, respectful of each other, and consciously interdependent.

In “Swarming Bees” Murray recognizes our collective desire for a solution, but knows that all we can articulate at this moment in history are the tensions and oppositions.  We cannot avoid these dichotomies.  Murray recognizes that plausible grand narratives are absent, but we still long for an integrating myth to guide us.  Holly Murray is aware that all solutions are a pharmakon: both cure and poison.  In this way life and death, success and failure, trust and submission are partners in all we undertake.  It is ambitious work with a Hegelian impulse to identify the polarities and then point to the outlines of a resolution.

Presence and Grace: Caroline Jennings

The work of Caroline Jennings speaks to the seperativeness of being, the limits of intersubjectivity, and the rare and holy moments of true meeting: annunciation.  The style of her work reminds us of many influences: Hopper with his slowing of time and isolation of being; Balthus with his recognition of the odd randomness of the quotidian;  Marsh's view of everyday urban life; Hart Benton with his surreal and organic colors; Chagall’s “Birthday” and Magritte with his struggle and puzzlement with representation.

It is remarkable that Jennings' work can remind us of so many and varied sources; she allows us to relish postmodernity as her work excites so many allusions to our cultural legacy.  Jennings takes these threads and weaves together a unique and persistent concern about human subjectivity.  She realizes, it seems, that even our best attempts at connection, empathy and compassion, are incomplete.  Empathy and compassion are mere simulations of connection.

Real connection is a moment of grace, where otherness dissolves in annunciation: deep mutual presence.   The image of the dove, a persistent feature in her work, the Holy Spirit in Christian iconography, is her signifier for this moment of grace.  Her images show how this timeless presence can emerge unpredictably, without ritual, in our everyday existence.  Her work is an instruction and a meditation.

Fruits of Our Labor: Tim de Christopher

Ð

““The Fruit of Our Labors” is a symbol of defined space, like the monument that our life might be, a way to define the space we have occupied over the course of our lives. And then to fill that space with the "artifacts" of our experience, abstract and "concrete", memories, clear and vague, personal and universal.” -Tim de Christopher

Ð

Tim de Christopher’s recent work “The Fruit of Our Labors” presents the viewer with a large rough-hewn wooden structure that conjures associations to a monument, a temple, a shed, a museum, a barn, a tree-house, and perhaps an ark. The construction speaks of work, time, and ritual.

De Christopher is a sculptor, drawn to the mystery and meaning of form. On the wall in the gallery, to introduce this work, are images of carrots that look like human forms hearkening to the doctrine of signatures: the herbalist notion that plants that have shapes like body parts, can heal that part of the body. With these images “The Fruit of Our Labors” begins a dialog among shape, meaning, mystery, and healing.

The 9 foot high structure, with the hint of a classic pediment, is populated with a hodgepodge of found objects and de Christopher’s signature stone sculptures. Within its open walls, are collections of baseballs, skeletal remains of cats, bottles, glass insulators, burnishing brushes, texts, a pile of stone sculpted to resemble bread, a dollar bill pinned to a piling with an awl, and a pocket watch. As more time is spent with the work, one finds bow-ties, an accordion, a whisk broom, a snow globe and a shoe form. From the rafters hang phallic sculptures, sculptures of roots that recall the doctrine of signatures, and numerous pendulums of sundry shapes and sizes attached to plumbs of varying lengths. Beneath the open roof, a floor of layers of thin slate patiently stacked is partially complete. Contained between the columns on three sides of the construction are large white stone tori strung on metallic rods like so many abacus beads.

De Christopher’s work is a spectacle, true to the Middle English that means: "specially prepared or arranged display." Beyond the pure pleasure of fascination, the work compels the viewer to attempt to unearth a metanarrative to somehow explain and encompass the endless possible interconnections among the objects. While the wisdom of postmodernity insists we abandon this impulse, such work revives a longing for this kind of comprehensive knowledge.

The confusing identity of this structure offers a parable for our life and times as we grapple with the meaningful appropriation of the past, beyond mere dogma, hoarding, and nostalgia, while attempting to articulate a coherent vision of the future from the materials we find at hand. What do we forget, what do we borrow, and what do we need to learn in this construction? This is a work in progress, as the title suggests.

Family Resemblances: Sally Curcio

Some people collect for investment. Some collect for pleasure. Some folks do it to learn about history. And some people "save things" because it helps them to fill a gaping hole, calm fears, erase insecurity. For them, collecting provides order in their lives and a bulwark against the chaos and terror of an uncertain world. It serves as a protectant against the destruction of everything they've ever loved."--Judith Katz-Schwartz

"Clinging is the origin of this entire mass of suffering & stress.”--Buddha

“I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’…” --Ludwig Wittgenstein

Sally Curcio’s new body of work, “Family Resemblances,” explores collections of everyday objects through assemblages. “Family Resemblances” refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory that words cannot be unequivocally defined by clear and specific characteristics, but rather through usage and a “train of associations” (or “family resemblances”) that emerges historically. His theory indicated there is no solid meaning, or essences. Wittgenstein left us with an uncomfortable uncertainty. Curcio explores our need, in the face of this uncertainty, to categorize and collect in an attempt to stabilize meaning.

Curcio shapes these objects into assemblages that evoke our fascination with categorizing and collecting objects, and our bent to be connoisseurs: each work obliges us to compare, contrast, rank, and critique a collection. Curcio’s collections comically summons this impulse into action. The works offers, in a self-consciously naïve way, the self-satisfaction of collecting a “complete” set of objects, and the need for recognition in publicly displaying this triumph. Curcio teaches us that the process of collecting, organizing, and display is a ritual that attempts to create an oasis of certainty, order, and self-identity. Among an array of work on this topic, the three examples below display the aesthetic appeal, cleverness, and depth of her work.

School for Guns

This work displays a motley collection of toy guns ranging in size from "actual" to miniscule. The craftsmanship among the guns varies showcasing the products of numerous toy gun makers. Implicit in the display is a notion of a pack, a group, or school with small, minnow-like guns, through the most authentic imitations. The larger guns are hand guns, and the smaller ones are automatic weapons in a ironic reversal of fire power. The guns seem to almost ascend and grow from some hidden depth.

The name "School of Guns" also suggest the cultural effect of the presence of guns. Guns as toys make harmless the deadly force of these objects, while romanticizing the drama associated with struggles to the death. Media images and the market for toys both spawn and foster these fantasies of struggle for freedom and justice. The link between freedom and violence is memorialized and writ into law in the U.S. Constitution. "School of Guns" speaks to the initiation to this view, its cultivation, growth, and support through social norms.

Eye Candy

"Eye Candy" is a collection of candy dots displayed in five strips. The candy dots spell "eye candy" in Braille. The work is a play on words and the senses. A person who is not blind cannot read the Braille, while a blind person cannot see the colors of the piece. The name is a sexual innuendo regarding a typically male appraisal of an attractive female. Finally: there is the candy itself: available to both male and female, blind and sighted for tasting, but now privileged as art, and thus prevented from being so ingested.

"Eye Candy" is a clever piece that reveals various form of blindness and experience. The work speaks to the challenges of collective experience given barriers of sense, knowledge, cultural status, and convention. It suggests the importance of respecting diversity given our subjective limitations: individually we can only know part of a phenomenon in question. The work demonstrates that through recognition of this limitation, we can open ourselves to alternate interpretations and possibilities.

National Geographic

"National Geographic" presents the spines of over 75 National Geographic magazines. The spines have been cut away from the body of the texts and hang collectively disembodied in random order. The weightiness of the glossy magazine, and the attending weightiness of the knowledge has been excised, leaving nothing but the bindings with the indication of date, volume, and the topics within the now eviscerated magazines.

This piece speaks to the desire for knowledge, the limits of time, and a kind of conscientious hoarding. How painful to throw away these exquisite magazines we may never read! In the past we could capture knowledge in an encyclopedia and enjoy the pleasure of its stolid and complete reference in our homes. This desire for comprehension and wholeness is subverted today by the endless spate of information that envelopes us. However, the desire for this ordered whole remains, and is nicely simulated by Curcio's ruthless decapitation of these volumes.

These three pieces are a sample of Curcio’s work. Her art deliberately confronts us with an alien obsessive attention to precision and order suggesting an unconscious urgency. This translates positively into visually satisfying art that evokes the simplicity and “cleanness” of minimalism, the freshness of op art, and the innocence of folk art. The shapes are simple and satisfying, the colors are bright, the work beautifully neat, and the materials surprisingly familiar, albeit re-contextualized. With these attractive simulated collections the artist has gathered a gallery of artifacts that speaks to our perpetual drive to somehow, in some way, take control and make sense of things.

A Deeper Ecology: Peter Dellert

Peter Dellert’s recent opus of work explores the dichotomies of surface-interior, figure-ground, present-past, and the natural-manufactured through an array of assemblages and collages. Dellert’s work cleverly juxtaposes these polarities and inverts their meaning in constructions that are aesthetically delicate, subtle and austere, as well as conceptually compelling.

THREE DISCS

An example of Dellert’s method is the collage “Three Discs” which uses a rusted oil-drum lid as a canvas for a palette of surgically cut and variously colored leaf squares. This weathered ragged metal lid retains two perfect circular holes on the north and south of its surface where oil had entered and exited. In between these precisely cut holes, Dellert places a perfect circle composed of a matrix of the cut quarter-inch squares made of desiccated leaves ranging in color from maroon, through magenta, to flesh tones.

The work displays the interplay of two actors, nature and human. We see the human actor reshaping nature into classical geometric shapes, while nature acts on the man-made object with its slow decaying process of oxidation. There is a steady and determined intentionality in these actions, human and nature that co-exist in this work.

There is also a vulnerability and sense of impermanence in the work. The fleshy tones of the leaf-pixels suggest a living form embodied as an array of cells. The central circular leaf construction, placed within the context of the cut circles on the lid-canvas, hangs like a heavenly body in a ruddy firmament. The fleshy tones that embody this imagined planet, reminds us of the fragility of our delicate earth ecosystem.

Reading Dellert’s work in terms of the relationship of form and color and their attending associations is only one chapter in contemplating his efforts. His work also requires that we read the history and relationship of the materials, themselves, that he chooses for his collages. Dellert’s works offer a compelling aesthetic experience that, with further reading, evolves toward ecological understanding. One trajectory of thought that emerges from contemplating this piece is that the mixing of a steel oil can lid with a mesh of leaves reminds us that oil is a derivative of ancient plants, and oil provides the energy needed to forge the human creation of steel. Burning oil as fuel vitiates the fragile conditions that spawn and nurture the metabolisms of plants, and that endangerment portends peril for our planet. The circularity of these ecological relationships among the material further interconnects this piece and also pushes the work to a political level.

NEW TERRITORY

A second example of Dellert’s artistic approach is seen in the collage “New Territory.” This aesthetically captivating collage begins a discussion about the difficulties of establishing the identity of surface and core, and then turns to interrogating problems in memory, knowledge, and the process of discovery.

The collage is not simply juxtaposition or overlapping of surfaces, but rather an imbrication of surfaces with each plane representing a kind of strata in a fictitious geological time. Dellert invites us to engage archeologically with this collage. The work can be seen diachronically as a history being pealed apart inviting our interpretation of layers that suggest epochs and eras.

The work poses an interesting problem of how to unravel history given the interconnected, randomly exposed strata. The dilemma is that to reveal something can also require destroying something else. Dellert’s construction entangles us in the unavoidable epistemological problem of privileging and marginalizing phenomena as we seek to know. His work offers no solution or optimal path to discovery or investigation into these layers of knowing, thus highlighting the ad hoc and accidental as elemental, and inevitable, in our process of knowing. The work demonstrates our reading and understanding as inevitably imperfect in historical time as it balances knowledge with obscuration, and insight with blind spots.

LOOKING FOR THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL

A third piece of Dellert’s recent work is a sculpture entitled “Looking for the Bottom of the Well.” This extraordinary piece is composed of a rusty water bucket, what has no bottom, and then is lined at the bottom with the carefully cut rectangles from a wasp hive. There are more than 1000 cut pieces from the hive of the paper wasp that are arrayed radially with remarkable precision, like the rings of a tree. The result is startling. The immediate association is that there is ice at the bottom of the bucket. The work has the power to conjure the memory of a cold winter day and the moment of wonder in finding this beautiful crystalline pattern.

The title suggests a search for a finitude, or a testing of depth, in “looking for the bottom of the well”, which is often obscured and unfathomable due to the covering water and darkness. This bottomless bucket offers the beautifully arrayed wasp nest cuttings as an answer. This response engenders a swarm of associations that are difficult to untangle into a coherent narrative. The hive and bucket are social constructions from two species. The hive is made from wasp saliva; it looks like ice when reconfigured in the bucket, and acts as the bottom to a bucket that can no longer fill its function. One senses that this work holds countless morals and cautionary tales about our relation to nature and social cooperation and a false notion of certainty. But the work does not easily yield its mystery and thus appropriately reinforces Dellert’s choice of title.

WRAPPED

A fourth work of Peter Dellert’s is his sculpture, “Wrapped.” This sculpture is made of maple wood saplings and rice paper. Its construction is the three intersecting wood rods bowed to create a volume. The sticks are wrapped with rice paper to form three lens shaped surfaces to create an interior. The work stands as a pod, a womb, is phallic, and is reminiscent of a dirigible all at once. Dellert has presented a shape that challenges essentializing and balances between many polarities: familiar-alien, feminine-masculine, natural-contrived. The work is a blur between a human artifact and a natural object. The sculpture conveys containment, tension, and a moment in development portending some sort of denouement. “Wrapped” resists easy appropriation and categorization, while being somehow familiar and approachable at the same time. It recalls the artist’s continuing interest in tightly weaving and inverting polarities of meaning

The four works discussed in this essay are emblemic of Dellert’s project of exploring the interconnection of form and substance. His work pushes us to examine the origins and relationship among the form and substance scientifically, politically, and aesthetically. The works’ aesthetic lure then challenges us to engage in a rewarding analysis that yields an appreciation, and attending surprise and bewilderment, about the complexity, appropriateness and interconnectedness of being. In this way, the work is subtlety and deeply ecological.

The Investigations of Chris Page

For the past eight years the artist Chris Page has devoted himself to painting a sole subject: the stream. Page’s interest has been an ancient source of absorption. Most famously, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus used the stream as an exemplar for the endless flux among all phenomena: the quintessence of uncertainty. Page is fascinated with representing this flux and the uncertainty of the object.

Page’s work is characterized by organic tones, richly layered canvases, and whirling brushstrokes. On first observation, Page’s strategy for representing the stream is perplexing; the speed, transparency, and sharpness of stream movements are absent. Rather, his images are soft, dense, cloudlike, and slow. Page is not a realist, or for that matter a typical impressionist. Page does not seek mimesis in a classic sense; rather he seeks to represent the “essence” or soul of the stream. This is where Page makes his artistic contribution.

Page, like shamans, Zen painters and Chinese nature poets identifies with the “spirit” of the stream and in so doing, to then allow his body to channel that knowledge to express itself via paint on canvas. The process is similar to the automatism of abstract expressionists like Pollack and De Kooning. The difference is Page is not seeking to express his own subjectivity. Rather he attempts to become the object of his contemplation: the stream itself. In the tradition of mystical experience, he strives to dissolve the subject-object boundary. In this way he is an abstract “impressionist,” if you will, rendering his impression of the essence of a phenomenon, rather than expressing his subjectivity.

Page augments this channeling with another method: he renders his work like a palimpsest. Page repeatedly works a surface with paint, and then scrapes it away to render another interpretation. This process parallels how a stream, in its inexorable flow, can express itself in an infinite variety of ways as it covers the same surface in a streambed. This literal imitation of the repetition of sedimentation pays dividends for Page as the surfaces are richly textured and nuanced with many layers of shapes and colors that are deeply organic and ancient in appearance.

Another strategy Page employs to capture his mercurial subject is to break the boundaries of a single canvas to create triptychs depicting the stream at different points in time and space. In this way Page explores the identity of the stream as it utterly adapts to new contexts. He undoes the identity of a physical phenomenon in much the same way Pollock and De Kooning unraveled the notion of a stable subject.In these many paintings, one is struck by Page’s tenacity as he ignores the inherent resistance to representation by his subject. This frustration of cognition, and thus representation, is a “wound” that Page highlights as fundamental in our attempt to connect to world. He repeatedly tries to heal this gap in his work and in so doing reveals our need for profound resolution. Philosophically his work is reminiscent of the Buddhist notion of dukkha, or the fundamental "unsatisfactoriness" with our relation to the world: our deeper needs long for something that phenomena cannot offer. The soft dynamism of the Page’s composite paint strokes with their subtle energy and deeply organic tones summons a contemplative state from the viewer. Page’s work has the power to bring us to the depth of his investigations.

In his most recent work, Page pushes further to apprehend the nature of his subject. New work has us descending into the stream. The viewer feels small within these new paintings, enveloped by energy. Even at this level of abstraction, the colors in these works retain an uncanny fidelity to what we know as natural or earthy and organic. In this work I seem to nearly be intuiting the atomic level; the shape of the light reflected in the stream appears DNA-like in form. I struggle to articulate this depth and the odd familiarity with these images. It seems Page is pushing toward the articulation of archetypes in current work; viewing these pieces portends epiphany.