Audie Murray: you can travel all alone or you can come along with me

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Audie Murray, "Rooting Gloves," 2019

commercial leather, cotton, beads, acrylic paint, 50" h x 12" w (including string)

Audie Murray: you can travel all alone or you can come along with me

Opening reception: Friday, Sept 27th, 6-8 pm

Fazakas Gallery's Tanúyap Project Space is pleased to announce Audie Murray’s solo exhibition you can travel all alone or you can come along with me.

Within the context of today’s fast-paced and technologically filled way of life, Audie Murray’s art asks of its viewers to take a step back and slow down. Inanimate objects ranging from gardening gloves to toilet paper rolls become activated the moment Murray’s needle and beads touch their surfaces. Through the artist's intervention, these once functional items are transformed into beautifully ornate and decorative pieces with powerful messages. The finished works beckon the audience to take a second look - to see slowly; to think slowly. ‘Slowness’ itself becomes a dual process in the artist's practice of creating and the audience’s engagement with the works.  Murray’s artistic practice, whether beading, casting, or molding, demands that she herself also work slowly, as she carefully manipulates her materials into eloquent designs which, with often humorous connotations, repurpose utilitarian items into new creations that spark contemplation and appreciation.

As noted by the artist's close friend and writer Quill Christie-Peters: “To move slowly is to look down at your palms and see swirling stars, to visit the place inside of your heart, to spit out structured time so that you may dance upon its edges. To move slowly is to create in ways that may never take the form of a product, to create beyond the physical, to challenge the hollowness of capitalism by refusing to leave our expansiveness behind.”

Audie Murray is a is a multi-disciplinary Métis artist from Saskatchewan currently based in Vancouver, BC. Working with themes of contemporary Indigenous culture and ideas of duality and connectivity, Murray draws on time honoured techniques and contemporary concepts to inform her material choices. She often uses found objects from daily life, and then modifies them with special materials and techniques as a way to reclaim or work-through the cultural content of the object. Murray completed a Diploma in Visual Arts at Camosun College in 2016, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Regina in 2017. In 2018 she attended the Plug In ICA: Bush Gallery Summer Institute in Winnipeg. In the summer of 2017, she studied traditional tattoo practices with the Earth Line Tattoo Collective and continues to work with hand poke and skin stitching methods. Her BFA graduating work, Pair of Socks was selected as the Saskatchewan winner of the 2017 BMO 1st Art! Prize, and in 2018 she was the recipient of the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize through the Hnatyshyn Foundation.