TODD MURPHY
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Murphy, an Atlanta-based artist who’s having his first solo show in Chicago at the Mindy Oh Gallery, uses a complex process to achieve his luminous effects. I think that if he were simply trying to simulate Old Master canvases, there would be more direct ways to do so. He takes mural-size photographs of human figures and paints out the backgrounds with tar. He does enhance the color and contrast in the photographs, but I can swallow this technique more easily than I can that of colorizing movies; this is his project and he can do what he wants with these pictures. Finally, he sets overlapping Plexiglas rectangles over the pictures to bring out the depth in their glossy black surfaces, generating not merely the color black but the look and feel of darkness. Standing before these large works, one feels swallowed up by airless parlors with their curtains drawn and candles burning low. Notwithstanding the bright lights that shine on the pictures to create strange reflections on the wooden floor, the cumulative effect of these pictures is to shroud the main exhibition space of the gallery until it seems a playroom in the Addams family home.
The figures in these photos often appear to be mannequins, and they seem to have been stuck in these airless rooms a long time. A child is poised atop a rocking horse in Romulus the Victor, clutching a toy bird. A man dead or resting in a recliner gathers dust in Cocoon. In an untitled work, a ghostly figure sports a hat with candles all around the brim. In many, the faces are completely obscured; in all, they betray so little personality as to resist any attempt at deciphering their reasons for being trapped. As in the plays of Samuel Beckett, to whose work Murphy’s has been compared, these “characters” exist not as human beings but as humanoid forms over which to drape a vision of life as an intractable ordeal. And as with Beckett, pushing a dark vision to an extreme can be funnier than you’d think.
David Blair’s film Wax, a fascinating and eerie fictive documentary about how a special strain of Mesopotamian bees can lead us to the realm of the afterlife, occasionally lapses into visual effects reminiscent of early video games, but it contains beautiful sequences of bees. To me, bees have far more potential as images in art and literature than, say, butterflies: they can sting, but they also exhibit astonishingly complex social behavior and create not only elaborate architecture but honey. Blair’s movie reverses the cinematic stereotype of the killer bee, and Murphy too recognizes the beauty of bees: besides the beekeeper veils and hats, bees and beehives are recurrent images. Perhaps I’m too much influenced by the creatures’ supernatural role in Wax, but I think they function in this work as shuttles between here and the hereafter.
