Elegy for the Golden Toad
Jennifer Murphy at Clint Roenisch Gallery ARTORONTO.CA
October 22 - November 26, 2022
Jennifer Murphy at Clint Roenisch Gallery ARTORONTO.CA
At first sight Murphy’s collages seem ready to fall apart. Indeed, their delicate pieces are held together by a fine thread or pins. The pieces are comprised of images of various organisms – both specimens of living creatures and plants, and fossils of those long since extinct – carefully cut out from books and magazines. These patchworks of images of animals, plants and fossils together constitute a larger image of either an insect, a bird, a fish or a plant, in the case of this latest show at Clint Roenisch Gallery.
The more delicate compositions are suspended directly onto the wall, while some of the more solid ones float a few inches from the wall, casting evocative shadows. They are hard to categorize, being halfway between collages and mobile sculptures. Perhaps they might best be described as ‘paper mosaics’ – a term originally used by eighteenth century artist Mary Delany. (Delany produced hundreds of exquisite images of plants that consist of layers of finely cut coloured paper on dark backgrounds.) This difficulty of categorization points to something interesting about her work, namely that it sits at the margins of what one might call mainstream art.
Of course, given the enormous variety of art produced today, to call anything ‘mainstream’ seems almost futile. But it is exceptions such as Murphy’s, I think, that demonstrate how it is not an entirely useless term. Most artists who use traditional media, including drawing, painting and collages, are to varying degrees concerned with the aesthetic and formal qualities of their images, as circumscribed by the idiosyncrasies of their chosen medium. By contrast, the medium Murphy chooses has limited possibilities with respect to these qualities. One might put it this way: If you or I chose to paint an image, it is highly likely that we will produce very different images. On the other hand, if we both produced images using the methods employed by Murphy, probably our images would be somewhat similar. That is not to deny the inventiveness of her method. Rather, it is to point out that her approach to art is less about those qualities that concern art traditionally. That in itself is not problematic, of course.
What does interest Murphy most clearly is her subject matter. For almost her entire career, which spans two decades, her focus has been on nature. Concomitant with this focus, Murphy tells me, has had an abiding interest in ‘collage’, that goes back at least to her formative years at art school at Queens University. It seems, then, that her approach has been deeply informed by her interest in nature. This fact suggests that Murphy is a fascinating hybrid of artist and naturalist. By the latter term I mean a person who assiduously observes the living world outside the framework of scientific theory and research. In other words, she is not simply an artist who likes to render nature – animals, trees etc. – but an artist whose love of nature is so strong that it shapes her very approach to art.
One way her love of nature is expressed is through collecting – flowers, plants, fossils and so on. Her studio houses a collection of these objects as well as a collection of books, magazines or pages thereof, which feature images of nature. It is these things which are the sources for her works, their building blocks. The images she selects for each new work is surprising. Her rendering of an orchid, for example, is comprised of images of snakes, birds, frogs, butterflies, moths, beetles, mushrooms and more! This eclectic and playful selection of constituent images gives the works a surrealist edge.
In other ways, her work reads like a random cataloguing of their natural world. It is as if by such seemingly random selections of creatures and plants, she is telling us that the living world is interconnected both across species and time – and in unexpected ways. Indeed, she points to coincidences in nature. For example, in her press release it is remarked that she “noticed in the Spring of 2021 that the emergence of the Brood X cicadas after their 17 year cycle of dormancy came to echo a past emergence of the same brood in 1919 during the last pandemic.” And like her works themselves, she sees the living world as terribly fragile. Fossils are seen as reminders of creatures that once crawled across the world, just as we currently do. This awareness only adds urgency to the present ecological catastrophe, namely the current mass extinction caused by us.
Finally, I find it difficult to pick out particular works on display, because, despite the obvious differences between them, they are in many respects ironically indistinguishable. One might, perhaps, think of each work as part of a larger piece, just as they are each made up of smaller images. But also this indistinguishability reflects a certain obsessiveness to her work. It is as if she is compelled to repeat herself, or rather to keep on pushing the same idea. This trait, perhaps, is also evident in the consistency of her work across the years. Maybe this shows how ardent her love of nature is. Certainly, there is a tenderness and joy to her work that is infectious.
Hugh Alcock
Images are courtesy of Clint Roenisch Gallery
*Exhibition information: Jennifer Murphy, Elegy for the Golden Toad, October 22 – November 26, 2022, Clint Roenisch Gallery, 190 St Helens Ave, Toronto. Gallery hours: Wed – Sat 12 – 5 pm.
Insect as Idea
Insect as Idea
Carl Beam, Christi Belcourt, Catherine Chalmers, Andrea Cooper, Aganetha and Richard Dyck, Jude Griebel, The Institute of Queer Ecology, Jennifer Murphy, and Amy Youngs
Featuring insect specimens from the Zoological Collections, Department of Biology, Western University.
April 28 – June 18, 2022
Curated by Dr. Helen Gregory and Dr. Nina Zitani
The beauty of bugs and biodiversity on display at Western's McIntosh Gallery
Insect as Idea exhibit is blending art and science to showcase insects under threat
Michelle Both · CBC News · Posted: May 22, 2022 5:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: May 22, 2022
If bugs could carry protest signs, what would they say?
A new exhibit at Western University's McIntosh Gallery is exploring the idea by blending art and science to showcase the beautiful, diverse and vital role of insects under threat.
"Insects are the most diverse organisms on earth," said Nina Zitani, curator of the zoological collections in the department of biology at Western University.
"That diversity is at-risk due to habitat destruction worldwide," she said.
Nina Zitani is curator of zoological collections in Western University’s department of biology. (Michelle Both/CBC)
Insect as Idea features nine contemporary artworks and a display of 600 butterfly and moth species from around the world – including some that are now endangered.
"The specimens are incredibly beautiful: the patterning, the colour, the variety of form. To be able to see them all simultaneously, an entire wall filled with them, it's a really rare opportunity," said Helen Gregory, curator at McIntosh Gallery.
Helen Gregory, curator at McIntosh Gallery, stands with Jennifer Murphy’s hand-sewn insect collages. (Michelle Both/CBC)
The insect specimens are part of Western University's zoological collection from the department of biology dating back to the 1920s and were collected from the Amazon rainforest, South America, India, the Himalayas, Africa, Canada and the U.S.
Themes of biodiversity, nature and colonization are explored in artworks by Carl Beam, Catherine Chalmers, Andrea Cooper, Christi Belcourt, Aganetha and Richard Dyck, Jude Griebel, The Institute of Queer Ecology, Jennifer Murphy and Amy Youngs.
"Everything is incredibly beautiful," said Gregory. "The work is really sensuous, really aesthetic."
Artist Christi Belcourt uses dots of paint mimicking beads to represent the interconnectedness of nature through images of birds, bees and native plants. (Michelle Both/CBC)
Métis artist Christi Belcourt's painting mimics beadwork to symbolize interconnectedness in nature, while Jude Griebel's wood sculptures depict insects protesting against ecological crisis, said Gregory.
Zitani hopes the exhibit will encourage more people to address dwindling biodiversity in their own backyards by planting more native plants.
"We need to create habitat to combat habitat loss," she said. "If we want to have the adult butterflies, we have to have the habitat for the caterpillars."
More than 600 butterfly and moth species from the zoological collections in the department of biology at Western University are on display at Insect as Idea. (Michelle Both/CBC)
Insect as Idea is on display at Western University's McIntosh Gallery until June 18, open Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.
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.”
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.
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”
My Modern Met
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
A table set by Judy Chicago
The Globe and Mail
A collaborative dinner celebrating female chefs draws inspiration from a masterpiece of feminist art
Iris Moon, a collage by artist Jennifer Murphy is a tribute to Georgia O’Keeffe’s famous Black Iris painting. It has become the motif of an event honouring Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party.
TORONTO
A table set by Judy Chicago
A collaborative dinner celebrating female chefs draws inspiration from a masterpiece of feminist art
Iris Moon, a collage by artist Jennifer Murphy is a tribute to Georgia O’Keeffe’s famous Black Iris painting. It has become the motif of an event honouring Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party.
Courtesy Clint Roenisch Gallery
DEBORAH REID
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 27, 2017
In 1979, artist and feminist Judy Chicago set the art world on fire when she unveiled The Dinner Party, a monumental multimedia tribute to women through history. Thirty-nine places were set around an imposing triangular table for women such as Sacajawea, Lewis and Clark's indigenous guide, and writer Virginia Woolf. A riot of feminist references, the piece is an evocative tribute to feminine creativity and pleasure – the surface of each dinner plate has a unique, sensual butterfly motif reminiscent of female genitalia.
"It made an overwhelming claim for women's history, for women's wonderfulness, for women's right to a place at the center of life and art," art historian Frances Borzello wrote.
Chef Alexandra Feswick is hosting a dinner at the Drake Commissary Sunday night and calling on the feminine imagination of chefs and artists to create an immersive dining experience.HANDOUT
Toronto chef Alexandra Feswick first encountered the work at the Brooklyn Museum. "It was overwhelming," she says, "I liked how the plate design became more sculptural as women's rights evolved." Following Ms. Chicago's lead, she's hosting a dinner at the Drake Commissary Sunday night and calling on the feminine imagination of Toronto chefs and artists to create an immersive dining experience. If Judy Chicago has set the table, then Alex Feswick is in charge of dinner.
For many of the 29 female chefs participating, it's their first encounter with the iconic piece of feminist art. The introduction is one of the beautiful outcomes of the event.
"I did not know about The Dinner Party before getting the call from Alex," says Jennifer Dewasha, executive chef of Toronto's Colette Grand Café. Some might have caught a glimpse of it in the Netflix hit Master of None. Touring the installation, Aziz Ansari's character, Dev Shah, turns to his female companion and asks, "Is it me or do all these [plates] look like vaginas?"
Ms. Chicago's piece makes the point that it's because of their female anatomy that the women were pushed out of history. She adds another rich layer in creating the work from traditionally feminine art forms such as needlework and ceramic – often dismissed as low art. In treating feminine artistry as sacred, Ms. Chicago challenges the notion that high art emanates exclusively from men.
That's a potent point of connection for female chefs whose skills and talents are often treated as less important than male chefs. Historically women's cooking has been hidden away in the private and mundane realm of the home. The barriers that prevent female chefs from entering the professional realm – strongly associated with masculine innovation – are substantial and still intact. International guides such as Michelin and the World's 50 Best Restaurants, the arbiters of haute cuisine, are frequently accused of barring the way for women.
Chef Meghan Robbins of Toronto's Superpoint is working with a team to create one of three menus for the dinner. In one course, they're playfully recreating Chicago's butterfly motif using shucked oysters and juicy crushed grapefruit segments. "Some of our original ideas were toned down a little," she says, "Artists can push boundaries a little further, and we're consuming in a way that the art is not."
"The idea that all of these women come together at a symbolic table is powerful," says the Drake's curator, Mia Nielsen. She's working with female artists to set the table for Sunday's dinner. Iris Moon, a collage by artist Jennifer Murphy, has become the event's motif.
"I wanted to embrace all the women at Chicago's table and chose the first and last plate as my reference," she says, "The moon and lizard represent the Primordial Goddess, and the iris is a tribute to Georgia O'Keeffe's famous Black Iris painting."
Sandra Brewster, Sojourner’s Stars, mixed media on glass, 2017.
Artist Sandra Brewster chose the place setting for abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth, the lone black woman in The Dinner Party, as her inspiration. "I was interested in the representation of women of colour in the whole project," she says. Chicago's been criticized for her white, middle-class perspective. Brewster's using a quote about equality from Ms. Truth as a personal critique, printing it on fabric and using the star and moon imagery from it on candlesticks for the table.
The Dinner Party raises the important question of why a separate table needs to be set for women. The rich details in Chicago's masterpiece demonstrate what's lost when feminine creative expression is stifled. She asks us to consider what's at stake when barriers are erected to keep women out and prevent them from fully participating in art and life. The point is not lost on Ms. Feswick as it relates to her creative life. "One day, at the end of the road, it would be nice for female chefs to lose the gender distinction."
“Freedom of Assembly” at Oakville Galleries: Review
TORONTO STAR
When the Oakville Galleries decided to name their summer exhibition “Freedom of Assembly,” I don’t think they meant it literally. More likely it was a cheeky little pun, given the show’s clustering of contemporary collage techniques, cut, pasted, reconstituted and reconfigured, both physically and virtually, in every imaginable way.
TORONTO STAR
July 7, 2012
By Murray Whyte Visual Arts Critic
When the Oakville Galleries decided to name their summer exhibition “Freedom of Assembly,” I don’t think they meant it literally. More likely it was a cheeky little pun, given the show’s clustering of contemporary collage techniques, cut, pasted, reconstituted and reconfigured, both physically and virtually, in every imaginable way.
But with 18 artists represented over the galleries’ two spaces (on the lake and downtown) that literal sense does creep in. Take it from me, 18 is a lot, and I’ll insert the caveat right up front: There’s no possible way I’ll get to all of them — in this space at least. But you can, and you should. Far from feeling stretched thin, “Freedom of Assembly’s” everyone-in-the-pool roster feels vital, fresh, and casually inclusive, opening a broad umbrella under which a whole range of contemporary practice comfortably fits.
This is really only appropriate, I guess, given the necessarily loose description the medium of collage demands. With its beginnings in the Victorian era as the idle pastime of ladies of leisure, collage was dismissed as trifling decorative nonsense. Be that as it may, the sudden proliferation of the practice was also the signal of a world on the cusp of sudden, seismic change: Reasonably quick, relatively cheap albumen photo-printing had recently replaced the clunky glass-plate photography of daguerreotypes, making pictures for the first time plentiful, non-precious, reproducible and disposable; snips, cuts, scribbles and other such previously-unimaginable savagery became the norm.
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If that sounds a little like the world we live in today — fast, cheap, and out of control — then you’re on to something. Contemporary collage, as respectable art and as an expression of modernity’s imposition of a disposable, mass-produced cut-and-paste world, is rooted in the early-20th century practice of the Surrealists, who contributed words to amalgamations, as well as images. Think of Rimbaud’s practice of the “exquisite cadaver,” which knit together random phrases from the Surrealist cohort to form bodies of what they called “automatic writing,” the likes of which was meant to channel a primal unconscious that cut through the modern, incomprehensible swirl.
Romantic though the notion might have been, the technique stuck. When Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, among others, employed it in their early expressions of Cubism in the years leading up to the 1920s, sticking oilcloth and newsprint to their canvases, collage became an inarguable part of the modern art canon. Picasso firmed up that status not long after, famously crafting any number of his fractured guitars from so much agglomerated rubbish. Robert Rauschenberg’s emergence in the 50s, with his gritty assemblages of cast-off junk and mass-produced images ushered collage into a thoroughly contemporary era, and for good.
And so here we are. “Freedom of Assembly” is stuffed full with good work, bordering on great. Echoes of the medium’s inherent critique of the disposability of a mass-produced world are inevitable: Georgia Dickie’s three pieces of precariously-balanced industrial salvage speaks plainly of a fragile ecosystem of objects, where utility defines how long they avoid the landfill, or scrap heap. Roy Arden’s beguiling, shuddering mobile of salvaged trash — a bent bicycle wheel, tangles of wire, rusted cans, a filthy glove — has an almost mystical quality creating a quiet, sad reverence for the accumulated cast-offs of a consumption-mad world.
Geoffrey Farmer’s homely works, which stand sentinel-like at the entrance of each of the galleries’ spaces, are a direct link to the form’s Surrealist past: A derby hat perched on a stick rooted in concrete is fitted with a poem: “I am by nature one and also many, dividing the single me into many, and even opposing them as great and small, light and dark, and in ten thousand other ways.”
Farmer’s poetic impulse aptly captures the medium’s essential core: Collage is nothing if not the practice of transforming the insignificant into the ineffable. Jason de Haan’s monumental New Jerusalem diptych shreds the covers of thousands of pulp science fiction paperbacks, and re-orders them as the all-consuming cloud that shrouded the earth in the biblical apocalypse portrayed in the Book of Revelations. Barbara Astman clipped pictures from a year’s worth of newspapers, day-by-day, and pasted them into notebooks to form a deeply personal journal of a mediated life, filtered through the news. Jacob Whibley’s intricate works on paper cobble and weave fragments of his voluminous — and messy, I imagine — rare paper collection, laying bare a compulsion to create order from an accreting mound of chaos. Jennifer Murphy’s Pink Moon, a curling assemblage of images of birds, butterflies, flowers and cats, all clipped from nature journals and sewn together with fine thread, transform the instructive workaday into an elemental swirl of predator and prey, life and death.
“Freedom of Assembly” places a necessary emphasis on the medium’s root in the handmade, but provides some essential updating as well. In the show’s downtown location, large, precise grids of small works by Balint Zsako, Marcel Dzama, Paul Butler, Alison Yip and Elizabeth Zvonar hang salon-style in a nod, perhaps, to its origins as a polite Victorian diversion.
Nearby, though, sits the gutsy mash-up sculpture of Valerie Blass, and the dizzying Orbits of Kristan Horton. Horton, who won the Grange Prize for Photography on 2010, is among the most innovative artists I’ve seen, bashing together various technologies to produce works that are entirely unique. Putting him in the context of collage isn’t something I’d considered, but it’s spot-on: Making the Orbits, Horton circled piles of junk accumulating on the floor of his studio, taking pictures with his digital camera from different perspectives. In Photoshop, he layered the images one on top of the other, creating the impossible: The same thing seen from multiple different points of view, all at the same time.
It’s a nice bookend, to a practice that served as a canary in a coalmine to a rapidly-modernizing world. But really, it’s less endpoint than “to be continued.” In a piecemeal culture teeming with constantly-proliferating throwaway junk, real and virtual, we’ll always need someone to pick up the pieces.
“Freedom of Assembly” continues at Oakville Galleries, 120 Navy Street and 1306 Lakeshore Road East, Oakville, to Sept. 2. www.oakvillegalleries.com
Murray Whyte is the Star's former art critic.
