Wil Murray: On Invasive Species and Infidelity

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RBC New Works Gallery Art Gallery of Alberta June 27 - October 4, 2015

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The Exploded View In drawing, the exploded view is a technical approach to representing schematic reality and the relationships between an assembly of parts and their functional whole. The isometric orientation of each element is separated into its distinct position along the Cartesian coordinate system, where an object in a space is articulated by its position on x, y and z-axis. Depending on the number of planes, the object can exist in either two or three-dimensional parameters. Something that appears to be at close proximity within a two-dimensional plane can suddenly seem very far away with the introduction of the third plane, depth.

These spatial aspects of an image are crucial to the fields of engineering and other functional disciplines reliant on the transposition of 2-D images into the rendering of 3-D realities. Over the axis of time or distance, they have become debatably less crucial to our paradigmatic understanding of both contemporary painting and photography: we can see and comprehend an image without the expectation of representational accuracy, or truth, to be held within it.

Understanding the element of time or space between objects within the construct of an image, spatially existing at a determined distance between each other, means that an operation occurs: each object has its position in relation to each other, aside from their position in relation to a viewer. In his lecture on The Event of the Image: Gerhard Richter and Photography, Christopher Lotz indicates: “images are complex dynamic and unfixed formations that are coming into being throughout our engagement with them. This is to say that the nature of images is performative and that they should be understood as formations rather than as fixed forms.” 1 Lotz later differentiates between painting and photography, stating that “painting does not depend on something external to the painting; instead, the painting constructs its own denotation internally through itself” while “photographs are dependent on a referent outside of the image.”2

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Elements of a Formation Born in Calgary, Alberta, Wil Murray began his artistic practice in drawing at the Alberta College of Art + Design. His work has evolved into a process-based exploration sited between the media of photography and painting, oscillating between the technical and conceptual boundaries of each. Like an exploded view diagram, Murray extrudes the elemental material parts comprising the painting and the photograph, and presents a new body of work exploring the possible combinations and permutations therein, each time arriving at a conceptual point that drives him forward into another vortex of technical, research-based experimentation.

The paint skin is one such central element. It consists of the isolated brushstroke, separated from its support. The brushstroke is a fundament of the painting. “A brushstroke is an exquisite record of the speed and force of the hand that made it, if I think of the hand moving across the canvas—or better, if I just retrace it, without thinking—I learn a great deal about what I see,” declares art historian James Elkins. “At times the hand moves as if it were writing, but in paint; some painting motions are like conversations, where the hands keep turning in the air to make a point.

Others are slow careful gestures, like touching someone’s eye to remove a fleck of dirt.”3 To create paint skins, Murray works on a mirror, horizontally applying acrylic paint in a gestural bravado to the surface of his reflected image, accelerating its curing time with fans and drying agents, and then aggressively scraping it off of the mirror, intact. The expansive brushstroke exists as the paint skin, in and of itself: no backing, no canvas, no support.

The pigments are suspended within the dried medium, allowing light to reveal translucency in areas of thin paint application and densities in the weighted endpoint accumulations. Its plasticity renders it pliable and bendable, creating a new form to compose an extruded composition; the artist can then manipulate and fold it over sculptural wooden structures, draping it away from the wall. In the mixed media installation Painted Shut,

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The Truth of an Image Fidelity refers to two things etymologically: faith, in the sense of devotion, or faithfulness in adherence to truth or reality4, whereby one would avow in the adherence to a belief. Perhaps the origin of painting can be seen to have rooted itself in this attempt: a decree towards a representation of reality, the truth of how things are, enacted in the substance of pigment and mediums adhered to a canvas support. The dimension of time has altered our reliance on paintings to demonstrate how things exist in an external reality to the work, and what possible truths could be found within, most notably due to the technological advancements of photography.

Adieu Vielle Europe 2, 2012 Collaged found photos, acrylic paint 33.02 x 38.1 cm

the elements are reconstituted in each presentation: there are lengths of wooden stretcher bars, acrylic brushstrokes and canvas, all of which typically comprise what a painting can be. However, the nontraditional extruded extrapolations of these elemental parts of the painting become a new operative formation: a painting that is in performance, a decidedly open work rather than one that is ‘painted shut.’

Reality could be found much more truthfully represented when delineated as light crossing an aperture, fixed to paper with chemicals in an arguably more exact, stable alchemical representation of our sense of truth in the physical world – as a photograph. Although a century and a half after the advent of photography, this medium has demonstrated that it too is fallible as a conduit in the representation of truth.

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Painted Shut, 2013-2015 VITRINE Bermondsey Square, 2013 Mixed media Dimensions variable 6

Wil Murray is well aware of this critical point in the development of both contemporary painting and photography, where the technological shifts have arrived at a similar point: through digital means, photography can now be abstracted and manipulated to the extreme by extrapolating the pixel, and advancements of screen and projection technology leave photo paper an aesthetic choice rather than a necessity.

Murray’s research into early and found photography brought attention to that point in photographic history where painting was a part of the process: colourists brushed on paint oil to colour in black and white photographs, in an attempt to convey more accurately what the world looked like. Popularized during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the muted tones

of the photographic overpainting method became archaic with the development of colour separation via additive and subtractive colour processing techniques, giving photography an edge once again in the perceived depiction of reality.

In his series Adieu Vielle Europe 1-5, Murray collages the isolated brushstroke, overlaying it upon found historical photographs. Each artwork causes the eye to oscillate between the micro and macro elements of questionable fidelity between the image of origin and the quality of its representation, the additive aesthetic component of the primary coloured paint and what remains, an image that sits at the axis between time distancing the two media in the final work, refuting any compositional resolution.

Threats and Infidels While wandering through the worn neighbourhood of Köpenick, Berlin, Murray found an original photographic portfolio, Die Welt In Farben in a flea market. Over time the artist found several other copies created by Johannes Emmer, published by Verlagsanstalt für Farbenphotographie Carl Weller in 1910. Murray separated the original book cover and portfolio of forty-one loose pages, creating new collaged brushstroke works over top of Emmer’s original edition of photographic prints.

Translated as The World In Colour, the book contains hand-coloured photographs of landscapes, cityscapes and monumental architecture from Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland.

To destroy one artwork in the process of making another can threaten the concept of originality, in addition to introducing conceptual ideas of the desecration of an image. Murray’s work cites the cut-up techniques and automatic actions of Beat-era artists and poets such as Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. Yet there is an intention to the infidel artist’s ‘vandalism’ of cutting and marking over original found photographic artworks long after the original artist could defend their work. The act of painting over top of the photographic prints, and seeing another artist’s work as a source and ground for his own, permits Murray to transform 7

Die Welt In Farben, 2014 Installed at AGA, 2015 41 Framed hand-coloured silver gelatin prints Dimensions variable

them into a new territory of what an image can potentially be. His contemporary artwork still retains the visible history and visual referents from the source photograph, yet performs as a new image contingent on the timing and position of his intervention.

Jacques Derrida, in his seminal text The Truth In Painting, begins by referencing a letter Paul Cézanne had written to Emile Bernard on October 23, 1905, “l OWE YOU THE TRUTH IN PAINTING AND I WILL TELL IT TO YOU”: Cezanne’s promise, the promise made by the one whose signature is linked to a certain type of event in the history of painting and which binds more than one person after him, is a singular promise. Its performance does not promise, literally, to say in the constative sense, but again to “do.” It promises another “performative,” and the content of the promise is determined, like its form, by the possibility of that other.

Performative supplementarity is thus open to infinity.5 He summarizes this debt of truth itself as a model of either presentation or representation, arriving at a conclusion of painting’s own inherent infidelity: Truth, the painter’s model, must be rendered in painting according to the two models of truth. Henceforth, the abyssal expression “truth of the truth,” which will have made it be said that the truth is the nontruth, can be crossed with itself according to all sort of chiasmi, according as one determines the model as presentation or as representation. Presentation of the representation, presentation of the presentation, representation of the representation, representation of the presentation.6 Murray’s medium-bending act of painting a brushstroke on a photograph, and then (often) photographing his mark and reworking on top of it, blurs the distinction between photography and painting, performing a new engagement that sits between the two media. Murray’s artworks are at once both photographs and paintings, while simultaneously negating the 10

fidelity of each medium during the performative distortion of making.

Maustlize 1, 2015 27.94 x 35.56 x 10.16 cm Hand-coloured silver gelatin prints and wood on board

It is this sense of performative presence that remains active in the work for the viewer. In contemporary digital image making, technicians are seeking the point at which the least information can be contained in an image and still be read by the eye as representational.

These studies of visual equivalence analyze the fidelity of the image and attempt to quantify what value might exist between image fidelity and image quality.

Research published by Hewlitt Packard Laboratories describes this as follows: Image fidelity refers to the ability of a process to render an image accurately, without any visible distortion or information loss…There is a natural tendency to confuse image quality with image fidelity…The two terms are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Although we often expect fidelity and image quality to be closely linked, these two measures are not always positively correlated. An image can be “enhanced” by a distortion. [One] may detect the difference between an original and its distorted version and prefer the distorted version over the original.7

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Jacques Rancière describes this as an alterity that enters into the very composition of images: “images… are not primarily manifestations of the properties of a certain technical medium, but operations: relations between a whole and parts; between a visibility and a power of signification and affect associated with it; between expectations and what happens to meet them.”8 In the works exhibited in Wil Murray: On Invasive Species and Infidelity, the value of truth in the works depends on upon perception: there is not one absolute belief to be found in them. Akin to the qualities of infidelity, there is a plural devotion to more than one truth: an introduction of a new species of cross-pollination and processing of medium and materiality that generates in an image the infinite possibility of an other.

Kristy Trinier Curator, Art Gallery of Alberta

Foonotes 1 Christian Lotz, “The Event of the Image. Gerhard Richter, Painting, and Photography.,” Symposium (2012), 2.

2 Ibid., 11.

3 James Elkins, What Painting Is (New York: Routledge, 2000), 96-97.

4 “Fidelity etymological definition.” Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed May 4, 2015, www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=fidelity&allowed_in_frame=0.

5 Jacques Derrida, Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 4.

6 Ibid., 20.

7 D. A. Silverstein and J. E. Farrell, “The Relationship Between Image Fidelity and Image Quality”, Hewlett Packard Laboratories Report, 1.

8 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image (London: Verso, 2007), 3.

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Artist’s Biography Wil Murray was born in Calgary and studied drawing at the Alberta College of Art + Design. He has exhibited across Canada and internationally, including at the National Gallery of Canada, The Hole in New York and the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Solo exhibitions include Please Boss Remember Me, VITRINE, London, UK, Die Welt In Farben, p|m Gallery, Toronto and Last Summer I Build A 1:8 Scale Model of Your Vagina, Staatsgalerie Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, Germany.

Murray’s work was presented in Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, and he received an honourable mention in the 2008 RBC Canadian Painting Competition. Murray is currently living and working in Okotoks.

Writer’s Biography Kristy Trinier is a Curator at the Art Gallery of Alberta. She previously was the Public Art Director at the Edmonton Arts Council, where she managed the City of Edmonton’s Public Art Collection, as well as related exhibitions and public art programs. Trinier holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Art and English from the University of Victoria, and a Master’s degree in Public Art from the Dutch Art Institute (DAI, ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten) as a Huygens scholar in The Netherlands.

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List of Works Painted Shut, 2014 Mixed media installation Dimensions variable Courtesy of the Artist Why Are You Looking Up Here?

The Yoke Is In Your Hand, 2013 Acrylic & inkjet prints on board 63.5 x 114.3 x 10.13 cm Courtesy of the Artist Pieces O’ Six 4, 2015 Hand-coloured silver gelatin print on board 76.2 x 101.6 x 12.7 cm Courtesy of the Artist Pieces O’ Six 5, 2015 Hand-coloured silver gelatin print on board 76.2 x 101.6 x 12.7 cm Courtesy of the Artist Pieces O’ Six 6, 2015 Hand-coloured silver gelatin print on board 76.2 x 101.6 x 12.7 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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I Gut Your Pair O’ Pracsis Rite Hear, 2013 Acrylic paint and found images on board 122.0 x 122.0 x 30.0 cm Collection of Glenbow Purchased with funds from the Historic Resources Fund, 2014 2014.025.001 Out Garrulous Enemgies 6, 2014 Hand-coloured silver gelatin print 38.74 x 46.99 cm Collection of Glenbow Purchased with funds from the Historic Resources Fund, 2014 2014.025.002 Our Garrulous Enemies 10, 2010 Hand-tinted photograph 24.0 x 17.6 cm cm Private Collection

The RBC New Works Gallery features new works by Alberta artists.

Initiated in 1998 and named the RBC New Works Gallery in 2008, this gallery space continues the Art Gallery of Alberta’s commitment to supporting Alberta artists.

Š Art Gallery of Alberta 2015 ISBN: 978-1-77179-013-0 Editor: Catherine Crowston Design: Cut+Paste Design Inc. and Charles Cousins Photography: Jonathan Bassett, front cover pp4; MN Hutchinson, pp 6-7; Wil Murray, postcard, pp 2, 9 Essay: Kristy Trinier Printing: Burke Group Printed in Canada

The Art Gallery of Alberta is grateful for the generous support of our many public and private donors and sponsors, as well as the ongoing support of the City of Edmonton, the Edmonton Arts Council, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Painted Shut, 2013-2015 Installed at London Art Fair, 2015 Mixed Media Dimensions variable 15

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