By Penelope Smart
The moment at evening
when the pictures set sail from the walls
— excerpt from “Cargo” by W.S. Merwin
Pictures on the wall in Jennifer Murphy’s The Shadow of Sirius stand tall and still. In the gallery, jewel toned birds, moths, dragonflies, frogs and flora of human-scale have migrated from a dream-like state or have been grafted from the pages of a children’s storybook. Except—as in a Grimm’s fairy tale—prettiness tends to couple with death. Murphy’s exquisite creatures came to life within our new countdown: one in which our time-frame for saving the planet can be counted in months (131), not years. As an exhibit that was mounted in the autumn of 2019, a few weeks after Iceland held its first funeral for a glacier and a few months before Australia’s skies turned red from its burning shorelines, Murphy’s silent gathering of animals, insects and flowers—borne from love, anxiety and heartbreak—take on the power of a silent vigil.
Mercifully, these works are not without grace. The Shadow of Sirius calls upon a collection of poetry of the same title by W.S. Merwin (1927 – 2019), an American poet and ecologist who lived on an Hawaiian pineapple plantation, a once-ruined patch of earth that he restored into a palm tree conservatory. Merwin’s devotion to biodiversity and deep ecology was a heart-centered and painstaking exercise. His poetry—sparing lines of stillness, self-possession and dignity—show us how natural rhythms and infinite connections meant (in a very real sense) the world to him. Like Merwin’s words, Murphy’s work speaks to a great measure of conviction and care. Merwin placed trust in nature’s immensity and impartiality; at the end of his poem “Grace Note,” he writes, “almost at the year’s end / a feathered breath a bird / flies in the open window / then vanishes leaving me / believing what I do not see.”
Image: (from left to right) Blue Fossil, 2019; Patinated Flamingo, 2019; Sunken Spoonbill, 2019 by Jennifer Murphy. Photo courtesy of Clint Roenisch Gallery.
There has been a special observance of birds. The kind with long legs and impossible S-curve necks: herons, egrets, avocets, cranes, and flamingos. Pink shorebirds are always eye catching, and the flamingos in Painted Lady (2019) or Patinated Flamingo (2019), as part of a flock of small collages of paper and shell, flaunt Murphy’s surrealist tendencies. Even her flowers, Poppy, Fading Rose, or Daisy (all 2019) are much more than innocent blooms, more like regal beanstalks, lavish and leggy. Though, it is Murphy’s Long-Necked Avocet, Glossy Ibis, and Great Egret (all 2019) who, on stilt legs, hold court in the main gallery room. Drawn from the richly illustrative vision of nature found in John James Audubon’s Birds of North America—it is as if Murphy, more than the 19th century artist-naturalist, knows the truth of rare shore birds, such as a heron. They are creatures who stake claim to the realm of the imagination. Adapted to be well-hidden at the edge of earth and water and sky, it is hard not to gasp if you see one.
Even though Murphy’s work consistently looks like it was made by a magic spider, her signature collage technique is disarmingly simple: hand-cut images from nature magazines and textbooks are sewn together into exquisite design. The effect is ornamental; insects as finery. As with the time-consuming work of ornamentation—fine lace work, embroidery, even calligraphy and scrollwork—the level of skill and effort required of the maker of work borders on the sacrificial. High-level precision and dedication is nothing new in her work, but these pieces show Murphy as an artist ambitious in her craft and owning new webs of death and life; hope and worry; hours and hours of it. Stand back and Quartz Moth (2019) is an object: a giant gemstone brooch. Get up close and the insect becomes a two-dimensional web of itself, a teeming network of magic-dust wings and tiny swamp things. Her caretaking of paper and compositions of nature is now so indexically-enlightened yet nonsensical, so and inexhaustible it can make you feel dizzy. Nauseated. Hypnotized. Do I look away? Suddenly terror of beauty and grandeur of tragedy comes crashing in.
Murphy treasures the ocean, moon, and tides. In the centre of the room is a spiral made of shells, corals, abalone—every sort of pastel skeleton or glinting husk of the sea—upon a circular plinth. The show’s namesake sculpture is yet another of her impeccable amassments and arrangements of a singular type of thing. In form, Murphy’s is a coil connected to Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1971), in content, however, the work floats away (or above) the masculine history of western landart, and towards the mystery of moon cycles or the sentimentality of shellcraft. Gazing at The Shadow of Sirius (2019), there is, above all, a sense of the infinite. There are no cardinal directions and time catches everything in its whorl.
Image: Installation view. (from left to right) Pressed Daffodil; Climbing Leather Flower; Quartz Moth; Fading Rose; Long Necked Avocet, all 2019; (centre) In the Shadow of Sirius, 2019 by Jennifer Murphy. Photo courtesy of Clint Roenisch Gallery.
As if on a ten-year cycle, the imagery in this exhibit circles back to the large gemstone skulls, birds and spiral designs that filled Clint Roenisch’s Queen Street gallery in Twenty Pearls (2011). Since then, Murphy’s practice has both evolved and devolved into wondrous scatterings of mostly small, generative, anthropological-tinged works on gallery walls. While The Shadow of Sirius remains an open-ended sequence, this new body of work has emerged as her most biologically distinctive in years. Murphy’s Blue Damselfly (2019) or Golden Moth (2019) have not fluttered in on a whim nor do they carry playful traces of human origin. They are bound to an eye-level plane like flies on flypaper; they are history.
One concluding effect upon the viewer is that Murphy has the guts to go big. In similar fashion to floor-to-ceiling collage works of the twenty-first century, the most monumental being American artist Kara Walker’s exhibition Narratives of Negress (2003), what Murphy pins up is storytelling on a grand scale—one in which hierarchies of big and small, or real and imagined can be considered and questioned. The epic narrative, however, full of empty space, is one in which humans have been absented. More so, it is Murphy’s shore birds, on their eloquent limbs, who have consciousness and poise outside the maelstrom. At the end of the decade and the eerie rose dawn of a new one, Murphy’s birds are an embodiment of grace and pause—moments of stillness before the future takes leave in flight.
The Shadow of Sirius ran from September 5 – October 12, 2019 at Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto, ON.
Feature Image: Quartz Moth, 2019 by Jennifer Murphy. Photo courtesy of Clint Roenisch Gallery.
Delicate Nature Collages Held Together by Thread Reflect a Time of “Ecological Mourning”
By Kelly Richman-Abdou on October 26, 2019
Collage artist Jennifer Murphy is inspired by interconnectedness. While this interest informs much of her work, it is particularly evident in The Shadow of Sirius, a series of delicate nature collages comprising flora and fauna cut-outs held together by thread. “Wedding the specimens of the naturalist with the visions of the fantasist,” these eye-catching pieces explore our real-life environment through a surreal lens.
Each of Murphy's collages is made up of a collection of photographs that work together to create a bigger picture. In order to aptly illustrate the artist's focus on the natural world, these smaller images exclusively feature animals, plants, and organic objects, like sticks, stones, and seashells. Once artistically arranged by Murphy, these photos form silhouettes of similarly-themed subjects, with butterflies, birds, and branches among her most revisited motifs.
In addition to showcasing the beauty of nature, these collages speak to more existential themes—namely, of loss. Relevant to the artist's personal life and to the world as a whole, this concept has recently given new meaning to Murphy's lifelong practice. “Although I have worked in collage since I was a child, I really began to explore large-scale, sculptural collage after the death of a dear friend and close collaborator ten years ago,” she explains. “This series comes at another time of loss, both personal and I believe collective. We now live in a time of ecological mourning and are in desperate need for paths to rediscover hope.”
It is this pursuit of hope that has inspired Murphy to create The Shadow of Sirius, a project that creatively shines a light on the earth's diverse ecosystems and, most importantly, reminds us that everything is connected.
In The Shadow of Sirius, artist Jennifer Murphy crafts delicate nature collages that reflect “a time of ecological mourning.”
Toronto Star
Jennifer Murphy and Valerie Blass: Deluxe redux
By Murray Whyte Visual Arts Critic April 20, 2015
Jennifer Murphy’s work is too many things at once to fix with any particular label, so let’s try a few: collage, sure, given the array of cut-out images she knits together bit by bit to build fantastically unnatural mash-ups of flora and fauna alike; sculpture, yup, as these delicately sinister hybrids have a tendency to strain away from the walls to which they’re stuck, quivering with the slightest of breeze; and spectacularly, captivatingly, unnervingly gorgeous, which you shouldn’t need me to tell you so much as you need eyes in your head.
That being the case, let’s go a little deeper. Murphy, who is from Toronto, has been practising her brand of menagerie-fusion, Moreau-like for a decade or so, and each step takes her closer to a fully realized world.
Her pieces have dynamic fragility that knits tightly together to her source material. Images culled from old nature magazines and textbooks have a naive, anachronistic idealism about a natural world quickly being despoiled at the same time as it was being preserved by the mechanics of a publishing industry playing no small part in its ruin (trees equal paper, which in turn equals vanishing habitat).
Murphy’s hybrids, maybe, are survivors — adapted beyond reason to a possible world where only their effigies can endure. She tells me that she thinks of them as Yokai — ancient Japanese animal spirits that embody everything from benevolence to mischief to outright evil — but, I’d add, with a thoroughly modern flourish.
Collage was ushered into the world of serious art, so to speak, by the Surrealists, who took to the form as an expression of the primitive unconscious, or so they said.
More recently, the world, and this city in particular, is lousy with collagists, many of them excellent. But none quite like this. Murphy takes on board the Surrealist impulse in simple poetic combinations — a kit fox morphing at the midriff into a swarm of leaves, or a yellow cobra emerging from a string of flowers — but rejuvenating an old form is one thing and underpinning it with an urgent contemporaneity is another.
Murphy does both as well as anyone, and maybe better; at the gallery, her hybrid beasts and ladies (creatures are interspersed with more subtle, oblique composites of images of women obscured by flowers) link one-to-next from wall to wall in a dazzling, ominous swarm.
Next door, at Daniel Faria, you’ll find Valerie Blass, a mash-up artist of a completely different kind. Blass’s combinations are bawdy, wry, gutsy and hilarious. “Sois Gentille” is one that Blass, a Montrealer, has titled almost as a tease (translation: “be nice”), because she has no intention of doing the same.
A famous forager of thrift stores and junk shops, Blass combines and recombines familiar junk with a mind to confound. La Meprise is one of those: A pair of kitschy porcelain figurines cased in velvety flocking — one is a preening kitty; the other remains a mystery to me and I prefer it that way — are fused together in an unnatural pose.
It’s cheeky, but gleefully subversive. Transforming decorative banality into something provocative and strange is one thing, but Blass is a sculptor and, like any sculptor, she’s left to wrestle with modernism and its legacies of ascetic purity, where form and material ruled all.
In La Meprise, Blass casts her junk-shop kitsch in basic black, reducing it to pure form — almost. Something’s squirming just under that silky skin. In case you missed it, she’s helpfully placed it face-on to a distorted mirror, with the tacit hint: Look again.
Underpinning all this is a deliciously wicked wit. A roughly made piece of splintery, angular grey plywood and bright yellow foam, looking like something modern primitivist Constantin Brancusi might have made if he’d been given the keys to a 3M factory, and this is part of the point: If modern sculpture was about purity, she’s here to muddy things up with the undeniable presence of a decidedly impure, throwaway world.
Even better, she calls it Surtout ne pas consulter les ingenieurs! which goes something like “whatever you do, don’t tell the engineers!” Blass doesn’t make work so much to explore materials or solve problems as to satisfy an unbridled, unresolvable inquisitiveness about what we value and what we don’t. The rest of it is up to you.
Jennifer Murphy in Caravansary of Joy, with Eli Langer, continues at Clint Roenisch Gallery, 190 St. Helen’s Ave., to April 25. Valerie Blass, My life, continues at Daniel Faria Gallery, 188 St. Helen’s Ave, to April 25.
Canadian Art
DECEMBER 15, 2012
Jennifer Murphy
Clint Roenisch, Toronto
Jennifer Murphy “Monkey's Recovery” 2012, photo Toni Hafkenscheid
by Kyla Brown
Jennifer Murphy’s exhibition “Monkey’s Recovery” at Clint Roenisch greeted the viewer with a stick rising from the floor topped with a bright-pink piece of tulle. On the gallery walls was a collection of curious objects that included lace gloves, a hawthorn twig, ceramic bowls, dried flowers, screens, disks and driftwood. Together, these clusters of low-relief, everyday craft objects created a crowd of simplified faces or masks, with the objects brought together to form eyes, noses and mouths.
Near the window, two framed woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi served as reference points that provided a key, but not an answer, to reading the exhibition. While the prints may have guided Murphy’s use of materials and content, what seemed most important was the phantasmagoria that Murphy brought forth.
The theatrics of “Monkey’s Recovery” revolve around Murphy’s impressive lightness of touch, which draws the viewer into the delicacy of the works. The materials—a feather serving as a smile or a dish that becomes a mouth—gesture toward the quirkiness of craft practice and toward its propensity to demonstrate that nature can fool us with appearances. Murphy’s installation functions as a formal process of material connections. At times, the objects become part of a shifting, unknown ritual, or the traces of the magic of a place.
The back gallery held framed collages of flora and fauna made from other intricate found materials, such as eel skin, cellophane, suede, butterfly wings, sequins, silk, gold leaf, lace and a first-place-horse ribbon. While the narrative aspect of the main space was not present here, the same ritual process of collecting and building forged a connection between these collages and the front-gallery assemblages. The collages seemed to function as studies—preparatory models for the mystic world of crowded faces in the main gallery.
“Monkey’s Recovery” was a departure from Murphy’s previous exhibitions, where her works showed off a more glittering, conventional beauty. The artist has moved into new territory this time. It is more strange and unsettling. It is also more stimulating.
This is an article from the Winter 2013 issue of Canadian Art. To read more from this issue, please visit its table of contents.
Kyla Brown
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
R.M. VAUGHAN: THE EXHIBITIONIST
Jennifer Murphy's sculpture-collages weave a hypnotic web
R.M. VAUGHAN
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 24, 2010
Jennifer Murphy at Clint Roenisch Gallery Until Oct. 9, 944 Queen St. W., Toronto; www.clintroenisch.com
Contrary to the stereotype, most artists are industrious sorts. And then there's Jennifer Murphy - the one-woman sweatshop.
Twenty Pearls, Murphy's fantastic new set of sculpture-collages at Clint Roenisch Gallery, combine fragility and bombast, the delicate and the spectacular, with unnerving skill (and seemingly limitless patience).
I'm not a big supporter of the Protestant work ethic as a value in itself, but when a work of art is so obviously labour-intensive and yet made to look effortless, even slight or ephemeral, one can't help but shake one's head in amazement and admiration. Murphy weaves hypnotic webs.
Here's her process: combing through old encyclopedias, art books and magazines, Murphy cuts out images of animals, plants, insects, gems, birds, skulls … whatever grabs her eye.
She does not, her gallerist assured me, print images off the Internet: The quality of the printed image thus sourced is simply not good enough.
From this collection, Murphy hand-sews bits together to make large, abstract constructions (in this case, the bulk of the works resemble skulls) - works big enough to fill a bathtub, but so frail they can only be held up with sewing pins.
Murphy's puzzle-fitting is deft, a marvel to watch. The sizes, shapes and colours of her culled sources cohere neatly, with strong internal composition, and are thematically intriguing. For instance, one of her skulls is composed of cutouts of jewellery and gemstones (a Damien Hirst nod?), another from cutouts of mummified heads and early-human skulls. My favourite skull was made with cut-outs of black-furred, feathered and scaled animals.
In The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience, a defence of ornament and kitsch, Celeste Olalquiaga describes the 19th-century habit of turning "the novel world of industrialized production [into something]more familiar by shaping it after plants and animals," a penchant that created "organic and mechanical … wish images" (such as wrought-iron lamps made to look like flowering plants).
Murphy's works update this material culture anxiety by trading the 19th-century uncertainty over mechanized production for our current unease with instant, and continuous, image production.
But you hardly need consider all the cultural ramifications of Murphy's beautifully layered artifices, her simulacra leap-frog games, to enjoy the final products. If anything, you'll be too busy propping up your jaw.
Canadian Art
MARCH 15, 2011
Jennifer Murphy
Toronto, Clint Roenisch
Spread from the Spring 2011 issue of Canadian Art
by Bill Clarke
Using the word “collage” to describe Jennifer Murphy’s work oversimplifies it. While the cutting and arranging of images plays a large part in Murphy’s process, she eschews the traditional pictures-on paper approach to collage by installing her constructions directly onto gallery walls. “Twenty Pearls,” Murphy’s first exhibition at Clint Roenisch, demonstrated that her practice has evolved; she handles her materials with a sculptural approach.
The selection of imagery is left to chance. Murphy culls the components for her collages from science and nature textbooks found at yard sales, used book stores and thrift shops, and from magazines like National Geographic. In this exhibition, Murphy used colourful images of birds, animals, insects, gemstones and flowers to construct a suite of five works that, from a distance, resembled skulls. In Black Bird Skull (all works 2010), the outline of a skull is delineated by rows of birds perched on tree branches. Butterfly Skull’s hollow nasal cavity is represented by a large moth, and its eye sockets are a pair of cells. The jewel-laden baubles that make up Gem Skull recall For the Love of God, the infamous diamond-encrusted skull that Damien Hirst produced in 2007. Gold Skull is made up almost entirely of pictures of smaller skulls and mummified heads, which suggests the work of photographer Jack Burman (who is also represented by the gallery). Each of Murphy’s skulls includes 50 or more individual pieces deftly stitched together with thread. She floats the assemblages away from the gallery walls with long straight pins, which gives them a web-like, sculptural aspect. Hanging away from the walls, the works quiver gently with the circulation of air.
The centrepiece of the exhibition was a large silhouette of a finch comprised of almost 100 individual images of birds, bugs, snakes, cats and gemstones. Displayed against a wall painted in eye-popping canary yellow, the piece sounded an optimistic note in contrast to the more elegiac skulls. In the end, Murphy comes across as an artful naturalist. She reminds viewers that everything in this world— the precious and the commonplace, predators and prey, the living and the dying—coexist in a delicate, interconnected balance.
This is an article from the Spring 2011 issue of Canadian Art. To read more from this issue, please visit its table of contents.
Bill Clarke
Canadian Art
