Jennifer Murphy: Monkey's Recovery
Clint Roenisch Gallery
Opening: Thursday May 17th from 7-9pm
Exhibition: 17 May - 16 June 2012
Monkey’s Recovery is an exhibition of new work by Jennifer Murphy including framed works on paper and assemblage-installations. The framed works are made from paper, silk, lace, eel skin, suede, butterfly wings, and other materials; the assemblages from shells, metal, flowers, pins, burnt matches, rusted gears and other objects both found and made.
Both bodies of work are loosely based on the woodblock prints of Japanese artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. In the mid to late 19th century, Yoshitoshi made strange and beautiful depictions of Chinese and Japanese legends centering around the moon, mist, witches, ghosts, demons, and other mystical characters and events.
In Monkey’s Recovery these stories are not retold, appropriated, or referred to directly, but rather allowed to permeate the space and cross-breed with multiple other images, ideas, and stories. In addition to Yoshitoshi there is the influence of Inuit and African masks (traditional and contemporary); European religious imagery; historical caricature such as James Ensor's dreamlike masks and scenes; and contemporary forms such as John Baldessari’s ears and noses, John Stezaker's uncanny surrealism, or the simple buffoonery of Jim Henson’s Muppets.
Murphy’s work delights in the basics of collage, where things stand in for other things, so that everything is multiplied. Multiplicity occurs sculpturally, too, through the coordination of many differing gestures and affects: extension, retraction, precision, lightness, spinning, dryness, richness. Also included in the exhibition are two Yoshitoshi woodblock prints from the series “Thirty Six Strange Things,” including Kiyomori Sees Hundreds of Skulls at Fukuhara (collection Jennifer Murphy) and The Peony Lantern (courtesy of Stuart Jackson Gallery). The exhibition title is borrowed from a work by Richard Tuttle. Jennifer Murphy graduated from Queen's University, Kingston. This is her second solo show with the gallery.
Owl
lace, bead work, wooden printing block, bull’s ring
2012
Installation view of Monkey’s Recovery, at Clint Roenisch Gallery, 2012
Aloysius
peacock feathers, ostrich feather, satin cord
2012
Thistle Eyes
dried thistles, shell, ceramic
2012
Lace Face
lace, pear tree branch, metal
2012
Baboon
paper pinata mask, fishing lure, geode
2012
Ghost
sand dollars, shell, cuttlefish bone
2012
Book Eyes
book with silk dust jacket, oyster shell, metal
2012
Book Teeth
foil, paper, books with silk dust jackets
2012
Installation View of Monkey’s Recovery
Scarlet Ibis
silk and coloured pencil, on paper
2012
Peony
silk and coloured pencil on paper
2012
Grey Ghost
suede and peacock feathers on paper
2012
Hook Moon
gold leaf and lace on paper
2012
Carp
sequins and coloured pencil on paper
2012
Bat
butterfly wings and coloured pencil on paper
2012
Shadow Fox
cellophane and coloured pencil on paper
2012
Snake
first place satin ribbon and coloured pencil on paper in custom frame
2012
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
Murphy Gets Real
NOW Magazine
Fran Schechter
June 14, 2012
Collage wizard Jennifer Murphy casts a spell with her show Monkey’s Recovery at Clint Roenisch. She sets the mood with two woodblock prints illustrating supernatural tales by her indirect inspiration, 19th-century ukiyo-e master Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.
They share the front room with Murphy’s assemblages, arrayed on different levels of the gallery walls. These take one of the simplest forms possible: a face containing two eyes, a nose and a mouth, a primal image that we’re programmed to recognize from infancy.
It’s a cabinet of curiosities of ordinary yet evocative found materials: seashells, marbles, lace and beaded textiles, buttons, rusty metal fragments, flowers, minerals, old books, feathers, candles, paper balls and discs, fishhooks and more.
Without substantially altering her palette of humble items, by basically just inserting them into holes in the wall, Murphy conjures the faces of household spirits, recalling Japanese ghost stories, the otherworldly characters in Hayao Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away and Inuit masks. They express a variety of emotions, from the irreverence of a cuttlebone “tongue” sticking out to the surprised “mouth” of a little square red dish and the seductive, feminine downcast “eyes” of two black lace gloves.
The back room holds works on paper that channel a Japanese aesthetic through subjects like fish, butterflies, moons, a fox. Some are painted, but many incorporate unusual materials that lend shape-shifting strangeness and resonance: pansies become a swarm of butterflies, while butterfly wings form an image of a bat a spider is made of eel skin. An ibis and a peony are “painted” with brush-stroke-like bits of silk.
In previously exhibited paper collages, Murphy imbued a frisson of weirdness to amassed photos of what we’d ordinarily consider pretty subjects like flowers, birds and butterflies. Her more stripped-down approach to working with real objects effectively expands her magic into three dimensions.