Moving Deaths – Dublin / Sydney / Melbourne
For his exhibition Moving Deaths, Gavin Murphy invokes a web spun from various sources: Ludwig Boltzmann’s theories relating to entropy and probability; the doodles of pioneering film distributor W.W. Hodkinson; man (and art’s) relationship with nature; texts by or found in, Delmore Schwartz, Milan Kundera, Nietzsche, and Montaigne; and the plastic possibilities of cinematic structures and mise en scène.
As a dialogue between generations of thought and representation, the work is formed upon meandering connections, yet is as much about the removal of the links between things. Carefully setting up a series of playful oppositions, Murphy’s aesthetic methodology relies on prior knowledge, yet eschews being wholly didactic. In turn, his work celebrates the inevitable uncertainty that is, in a post-enlightenment world, the reward of investigation. The result betrays a compulsive need to create structure and order, while at the same time giving in to the notion that these very actions are futile.
The works in Moving Deaths are related through an essayistic form of sculptural assemblage, made of sourced and carefully selected found materials, video, text and various forms of photography. Often transforming ubiquitous, discarded, recycled (or un-recyclable) components, Murphy orders these to present poetic and confounding sculptural work made up from non-traditional sculptural materials. For this his second solo exhibition he has extended these to include unique fabricated elements, as well as a return to co-authorship in a work made with former collaborator Sinead Gray (née Burt-O’Dea).
Murphy’s practice draws from an intertextual palette, combining the fictive and the factual, literature and philosophical thought, in order to pose concerns regarding time, existence, the history of ideas, and the future of said history. The piece Monument to W.W. Hodkinson for example portrays a universally recognised, yet fictional landscape - the Paramount Studios logo. This, Murphy explains, was originally sketched out on a dinner napkin complete with a ring of stars by the studios’ founder. Hodkinson, who based the image on the memory of a mountain from his Utah home, was later fired from Paramount and slipped into obscurity, yet the model of film distribution that he introduced became the standard that has existed with few changes for almost a century. Now, the logotype and stars have been painstakingly erased to reveal the original memory – a monument to its creator, and to the permanence of the image and system he created.
Exhibited
Conical, Melbourne
March 2009
Link
ICAN, Sydney
February 2009
Link
The LAB, Dublin
November–December 2008
Review
Gavin Murphy: Moving Deaths, Barbara Knezevic, Circa Art Magazine, Issue 127, Spring 2009