Dorsch Gallery is pleased to present two solo shows opening March 13, 7-10pm: Elisabeth Condon’s Walkabout and Martin Murphy’s Don’t Forget to Crash.
Martin Murphy’s Don’t Forget to Crash is his first solo show at Dorsch Gallery, featuring four videos and three sculptures. Murphy’s imagery is crisp and haunting, while the psychology drawn out in his works points to the fragility of human sanity. By pairing the narrative capacities of sound and moving image with sculptural components, he provides the pieces of a story to be completed by the viewer. As text and imagery cycles through a video loop, the artwork immerses the viewer in a projected state of mind, which cannot distinguish memory from the effect of memory.
Martin Murphy explores the potential of media in its relation to sculpture in conversation with historic figures in the history of video such as Bruce Nauman and Tony Oursler. His practice also engages with film – Hitchcock certainly comes to mind. He has a Bachelor’s from Kansas City Art Institute (2005) and a Master’s in Fine Art from Hunter College, New York (2009). Much of the work in this show was developed in the year since his graduation from Hunter. His work has been included in group shows around the country, as well as in “Last Day of Magic” at the 53rd Venice Biennial in Italy and “Destruction Show” at the HBC Center in Berlin, Germany.
Walkabout is an exhibition of new paintings made while Elisabeth Condon was at the Fountainhead Residency, Miami. She states “painting becomes my version of Walkabout, suspending time and space to materialize new perceptions and insights.” The centerpiece of the show, a 312 inch-long painting entitled Field Notes, is inspired by Huang Gongwang’s 1347-50 scroll Dwelling in the Fu’Ch’un Mountains. Condon responds to this scroll on many levels: proportion, paint, line, space, philosophy and subject matter. She plays with the properties of the scroll’s proportions, abutting various temporal moments, geographic locations and aesthetic influences. She invites the viewer to walk the painting’s length, a metaphor, in the looking, for the artist’s own travels and resulting transformation.
Elisabeth Condon has had solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, including shows in Sydney, Australia and Beijing, China. Her work is in the collections of the US Department of State Art in Embassies Program in Beijing, China; Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz, Fort Lauderdale, FL; and Roger Evans, London, UK. Condon is the recipient of numerous grants and has participated in residencies in Spain, New York, China, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and most recently, the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, FL.