Wil Murray Takes on London

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Wil Murray shadow-boxes with painting and photography in The Onlyes Power is No Power, on display in London until Jan. 2. His installation extends the viewing experience, taking advantage of the unusual space and experimental focus of Vitrine, a long, shallow window gallery. Murray painted black acrylic brushstrokes on the windows that enclose and frame his work. They cast shadows into the display space while echoing the process he used to create his five large photographic prints. These works, shaped by their own inherent brushstrokes, are handsome graphic objects with a baroque sense of overlapping histories, techniques and aesthetics.

Conceived for the 2017 Alberta Biennial, for the time being, curated by Peta Rake and Kristy Trinier, this cunningly convoluted work is Murray’s most ambitious project. His starting point was a hazy bit of his family history – his great-great uncle had been a circus ringmaster, and his great grandmother may have been a contortionist. As part of his research, Murray mapped the tours of Hoffman’s Novelty Circus in Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia from 1933 to 1943, when it was disbanded due to travel restrictions in the Second World War.

He also located sites across the Prairies where Japanese Fu-Go, or balloon bombs, had been reported. Some 9,000 of the rubberized silk-and-paper balloons were launched from Japan in 1944 and 1945. They were designed to cross the Pacific on prevailing winds, causing fires and panic in North America, but few actually landed.

Murray identified 10 communities the circus had visited and where bombs later fell. He considered the gap in time between the events: creativity halted and then random danger arrived. He charted his own circuit, imagining he could time travel and bridge that gap in time and space through his art as he traversed a 4,000-kilometre route twice, once in summer, the season of the circus, and again in winter, the time of the bombs.

In motel bathrooms along the way, he loaded the negative holder of his Graflex speed graphic camera, sandwiching colour film with clear plastic bearing black paint strokes, effectively overlapping photographs with the drippy, accident-prone painting process he relished in earlier work.

In a second mode of doubling, he overlapped the narratives of the circus and the bombs by taking summer and winter exposures at each of the 10 locales and turning them into double exposures. Later, he collaged the double exposures from two locations on top of each other in Photoshop to build compositional complexity and link sites along a route, for instance from Moosejaw to Porcupine Plain in Saskatchewan. The resulting five works compress this transformative journey, looping through time and across the space of the Prairies.

Murray’s superimposed realities elicit the painted collages of French avant-garde painter and poet Francis Picabia. Murray delights in literature and the show’s title refers to a fictional character whose spelling is best read aloud to be understood; again, two kinds of communication intersect. The title is itself a quotation from the cult post-apocalyptic novel, Riddley Walker, by American writer, Russell Hoban, that signals a moment when the protagonist realigns his thinking and finds solace.

Born in Calgary and a graduate of the Alberta College of Art and Design, Murray gained national attention as a 2005 and 2008 finalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. He has exhibited extensively in the last 10 years, working from studios in Montreal, Toronto, Okotoks, Alta., and Berlin, where he now lives.