About the Exhibition
moniquemeloche is thrilled to present Ben Murray’s third exhibition with the gallery, If I Needed You.
Well, if I needed you
Would you come to me
Would you come to me
And ease my pain?
– Townes Van Zandt (1972)
Operating between painting’s long history of image-making and the immediate vanishing of images in film, If I Needed You is in direct conversation with works created by pioneers of Avant Garde cinematography, such as Rose Lowder, Hollis Frampton, Joseph Cornell, Michael Snow, and Steve McQueen.
While inspired by the oeuvres of other artists, this new body of work reflects a deconstructed vantage point of Murray’s life at the time of applying paint to canvas. Drawing its name from the celebrated Townes Van Zandt song, If I Needed You recalls Murray’s complicated relationship with the notion of home, surveying both the solace and suffering that can be experienced when strongly tethered to family histories and responsibilities. Layered marks embedded on both sides of raw unstretched muslin utilize a range of opacities, transparencies, and refractive hues, as if to composite a myriad of enigmatic moments through deposits of paint. Each mark, a record of the artist’s physical movements through his recollected history, while also paralleling durational movements in the films from which each work’s brilliance is inspired.
Selected for both their formal considerations as well as their structuralism, each experimental film is played on a continual loop in Murray’s studio, integrating within the artist’s vernacular and embracing the precarious relationship to time and brevity of the present. The ever-changing landscapes of Lowder’s Bouquet’s charges the works with transformational images that exist somewhere between urban and native ecological systems, echoing Murray’s coexistence between the city and the Indiana Duneland. While Cornell’s ‘Rose Hobart’ reflects Murray’s personal narrative related to the bonds and obligations of caring for family. They are active participants, destabilizing each image to create works that acknowledge interminability through the movement of light and form and the transition of imagery.
If I Needed You offers a window through which to reexamine and re-experience the different stages of Murray’s life as they relate to the inescapable pull of one’s past and homeland. Depicting fragments of intermittent images and memories stitched together, Murray’s captivating works bring significance to a collection of stages of development sustained all at once in past-present-future-tense.
Runtime: 4 min
Ben Murray (American, b. 1977) earned his MFA University of Illinois at Chicago in 2013 and his BFA Herron School of Art and Design, Indianapolis, IN (2011). He was a 2014 Artist in Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska and a 2012 MFA Resident at Ox-Bow in Saugatuck, Michigan. He has exhibited at Kaplan A.I.R Exhibitions, curated by John Neff (2013); Gallery 400 (2013); Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE (2015); Cleve Carney Gallery, College of Dupage, Glen Elynn, IL (2018); University of Illinois at Chicago Galleries, Chicago, IL (2018); and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2016, 2019) Murray is currently the Adjunct Assistant Professor, Indiana University Northwest, Gary, IN.