FOLLOW US ON
In this most recent body of work, experimental film has become a major influence on how I approach duration in my subjects. While I paint, films are played on a continual loop in my studio, allowing me to operate between painting’s long history of image-making and the immediate vanishing of images in film.
These paintings are a deconstructive reflection of where I am physically, and the titles are symbolic of my surroundings. We recently moved from Chicago to the dunes of Gary, Indiana and I have become immersed in the landscape here. I grew up a few miles away, recording music in my dad’s garage, and am now making work focused on duration with a lot of the same impulses. This area has been a checkpoint for me in a lot of different roles at different times over the years, but the ground is relatively unchanged. There is a movement to that figure–ground relationship that I want to make visceral. Depicting fragments of intermittent images and memories stitched together, sustained all at once in past-present-future tense.
Ben Murray uses his whole body in a sort of dance to accomplish these broad strokes on this large canvas. Layered painting marks embedded on both sides of evolon (clear plastic) utilize a range of opacities, transparencies, and refractive hues, as if to composite a myriad of enigmatic moments through deposits of paint. Each mark is a record of the artist’s physical movements through his recollected history and accompanied by experimental film playing in the background.