February 2-25, 2018

Hybrids

My work marries traditional illusionistic painting space with the latent psychological aspects of digital manipulation to explore the sexual unconscious.

In my paintings, drawings, and digital images, I explore themes of identity and transformation. These images are intimate, even erotic, and reference various body parts, some comic, others hideous. My works are compelling, even disturbing, but also playful, straddling comedy and tragedy. I am interested in exploring the grotesque as a reflection of her own reality, and these works embody the tension she feels between the deadly serious and the blackly, subversively humorous.

My work is not conventional realism, although she does use a recognizable source. These images all arise from the face of one sibling taken from the last photograph of my intact family. Through digital manipulation, color and scale, I elaborate on the dynamic emotional content of my relationship with this sibling. Teasing out the struggle for individual identity within familial roles and the sometimes traumatic psychological consequences—disintegration, fragmentation—of this struggle, my work also posits the formation of a unique, whole, and integrated self forged from these experiences.

I think of what I do in terms of Surrealism’s imaginative reworking of reality, using the familiar to create the jarringly unexpected. Distortion serves as a metaphor in my work for physical and psychological transformation. The seamless spatial and scale disjunctions of digital language evoke the illogical juxtapositions of dreams. The mutation of teeth and eyes into abstract forms suggesting sexual orifices and protrusions creates ‘disembodied’ figures that are uncanny and absurd. Unlike conventional figures, these resemble cross-sections of the interior body: the translation of facial topography into sexual anatomy mirrors the movement from exterior to interior, from object to subject.

I call these works Hybrids, firstly, because they combine portraiture and self-portraiture: the external representation of a sibling with my emotional perspective and my experience of my own body; secondly, they combine disparate modus operandi, such as interior and exterior spaces, abstract and representational imagery, illusionistic and digital languages; and thirdly, hybridity expresses my fundamental belief that nothing is pure or without aspects of other realities.

 In these works, I am providing a psychological, visual, and material context for a moment of transition, of something becoming—a new entity, a merged whole—through the integration of color, surface and light.

Mary Murphy was born in Staten Island, NY and received her MFA from Tyler School of Art, studying with Robert Storr, Frank Bramblett, Margo Margolis and Stan Whitney. She completed her undergraduate degree at Barnard College, graduating cum laude with a BA in English and Writing, and received an MA in Art and Education from Teachers College. Murphy also attended The New York Studio School and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was a Fulbright Fellowship finalist (Spain), has been a three-time finalist for a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and was a finalist for the Bader Fund Grant. She has received an NEA Fellowship, a Fellowship and several Special Opportunity Stipend grants from the PA Council on the Arts, and a Fleisher Challenge Grant from the Fleisher Art Memorial of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In addition, she has had residencies at the VT Studio Center and VA Center for the Creative Arts and will be a resident at the Brooklyn Cluster National Residency Program in 2018.