Rewind: Jennifer Murphy
Greener Pastures Contemporary Art, Toronto
Imagine northern Ontario, where scant remains of human activity consist of abandoned hunters' shacks, slowly reclaimed by the earth on which they stand, fragile and forgotten. Those who require the tangible isolation provided by an eight-hour drive north of Toronto find refuge in these dense woods, where the wilderness can be sensed and natural cycles govern time. There is a darkness here, a Gothic air emanating from the forest, where the ground underfoot is dank with decomposition, and with the darkness comes a heightened sense of beauty and texture.
Jennifer Murphy creates totemic images that imbue the denizens of this region with an aura of grace that is worthy of admiration, if not worship. Her portraits of wildlife appear isolated on single sheets of archival paper, outlined in pencil and filled in with swatches and snippets of fabric. A far cry from aboriginal imagery but drawn from the same northern Ontario bush where she spent last summer, these images are icons in a mythology of mortality and the forest floor. Totems identify clans, mark taboos and signal danger. They are charged symbols derived from animals that are both revered and feared. Murphy gravitates to those creatures that remain in the shadows, allied with the darkness.
It is a menagerie of ravens, mushrooms, bats and snakes. With it comes a personal iconography of abstract night landscapes, surrealist eyes, tattooed skulls, roses, stylized starbursts and celestial bodies. This psychedelic aesthetic exploits the texture of found materials. Her Martian moon in metallic orange and silver wrapping paper, her dense forest of masking tape pierced by slivers of coloured ribbon and her abstract lake set aglow by a surface of cellophane tape dazzle with primitive, trashy élan. Mixing the natural (birds, bones and flowers) with the unnatural (lace, velvet and foil), the end result is supernatural.
While she considers the work to be drawing, it's hard not to think of it as something between collage and painting. Instead of brush strokes, she uses fragments of silk and satin as colour. She exploits the transparency of lace to reveal. Her dragonfly has wings of pink tulle with finely webbed threads that emulate the filaments of the insect's wings. Delicate patterns on a gold plastic doily, cut into slivers, become the limbs of a long-legged spider. The cheap and gaudy doily is key to the works' alchemical flux. From plastic to gold, trashed fabric to fine art, insect to starburst, vermin to totem, Murphy creates beautiful images with a naturalist's eye. Decorating her brood in fine silks and satin cloth, she celebrates them and magnifies their power, transmuting base subjects into noble spirits.
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