Noisy Ghost
Noisy Ghost
Ben Murray & Jeremy Bolen
opening reception: 6 September 2019, 7 pm – 10 pm
Exgirlfriend Gallery Lankwitzer Str. 14, 12107 Berlin
7 - 27 September 2019 by appointment
Berlin Art Week opening hours:
Friday, 13th – 13.00 - 17.00
Saturday, 14th – 13.00 - 17.00
Sunday, 15th – 17.00 - 19.00: Exhibition tour and cocktail hour led by gallery director Elena Feijoo
Noisy Ghost is an exhibition focusing on exposing invisible forces created by the human condition. Through unconventional modes, both artists translate observations of the unknowable through the use of site as an apparatus or the performance of depiction.
Bolen's recent work focuses on our ability to observe radioactivity through site specific, experimental modes of photography and scientific investigation. Hovering between empirical recording and scientific measurement Bolen investigates The Morris Operation ––the only high level radioactive waste storage facility in the United States––holding 772 tons of spent nuclear fuel and sitting just 60 miles from the city of Chicago. To record the evolving, invisible energy surrounding the site Bolen employs buried film, asphalt, and the Advanced Photon Source Beam at Argonne National Laboratory (where Bolen became a "User" in 2014) to help extend our sensory capabilities and perceive the unseen.
Murray’s most recent paintings expand on the notion of recording memory by using historical conventions painting while looking to moving images as the subject. These homages to the works of experimental film icons such as Carolee Schneeman, Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton present complex atmospheric forms created from the films durational compositions. While they appear reminiscent of early American Abstract Expressionism, these paintings are in fact deceptively observational attempts to depict the films duration while they are being played in real time. Eventually, the linear narratives dissolve into a multi-layered surface of paint that confuses beginning and end. The result is an artifact of a performance that attempts to repeatedly capture the rapidly disappearing.
The intersections of these works diverge into other ghosts and ghost stories that the artists evoke through modes of painting, photography, sculpture and installation resulting in a nebulous experience where the viewer is engulfed in presences beyond normal sensory capabilities.
“Noisy Ghost” will be presented in the main gallery space alongside the exhibition “Die Versteinerten,” by Aaike Stuart and Esteban Rivera.
exgirlfriendberlin.com
Moving Image
Moving Image
A Solo Exhibition by Ben Murray
Opening Reception for the Artist:
This Friday, May 10th. 5 pm - 9 pm.
Additional Hours:
Saturday, May 11th. Noon - 4pm
and always by appointment.
Christopher West Presents
1495 N Harding Street, Indianapolis.
I am extremely excited to announce Moving Image, a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Indiana native Ben Murray.
Murray's most recent large-scale paintings and works on paper continue to expand the artist's interests in memory by creating abstract observational paintings that look to motion pictures as the subject. According to the artist, "It is an attempt to suspend a film’s duration by painting it while being played in real time."
A review in Chicago's New City from his most recent exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery says "Murray’s process of constructing space parallels the way in which memory defies chronological conventions and retrieves uncontrollable shifting associations."
Ben Murray (b. 1977, Merrillville, IN; lives and works Gary, IN) received his MFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2013 and his BFA from the Herron School of Art, 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.
His work has been recently exhibited at venues across the country and highlighted in solo exhibitions at Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and Sidecar Gallery in Hammond. This will be his first solo exhibition in Indianapolis since 2006.
In Life Review
In Life Review"
Exhibition dates: February 10 - April 1, 2017
A “life review” is a phenomenon widely reported as occurring during near-death experiences, in which a person rapidly sees much or the totality of their life history in chronological sequence and in extreme detail. For his second solo show at moniquemeloche, Ben Murray continues his investigation into the aesthetics of memory with new paintings that explore this mortal notion using a cinematic lens, as if life itself were a screenplay to be viewed before the final frame.
Multi-layered, semi-representational paintings of recollected places and events, the works on view comprise the moments that shape a lifetime, mundane or otherwise. Void of characters or dialogue, these compositions are constructed in a durational framework, simultaneously conveying the multiple frames of lived experience in reverse. Images appear, dissolve and become filters for one another; light is shifting and transitional; time is elongated and compressed. Here, Murray performs the role of the projectionist, transforming all semblances of the everyday into mere apparitions on the painterly screen.
Centerville
Centerville"
Opening reception tonight, 4-7 PM
Exhibition dates: April 5 - May 31, 2014
Ben Murray's atmospheric images depict banal objects as transformed by the effects of memory, mood and painterly improvisation. For his first solo exhibition at moniquemeloche, Murray presents recent, large-scale oil paintings posing as vernacular symbols of experience from the artist's suburban Indiana hometown, the land formerly known as Centerville.
This centrally located town has a complicated history. Claimed as Wiggins Point in 1835 when Jeremiah Wiggins came upon a clearing of land along the Sauk Trail by the Potawatomie Indians, it was renamed Centerville after only three years - when Jeremiah died and because of its central location in the east-west trade route. Forty-seven years later, in 1885, when the first Post Office was established in the area and because another Centerville, Indiana previously existed, the land's name had to change once again. It was briefly Merrillsville and finally Merrillville after the brothers Dudley and William Merrill, who were some of the earliest settlers. Merrillville officially became a town in 1971 and a major destination point for the white flight from Gary, Indiana for the following two decades - the time of Murray's youth.
The paintings display the layering of attempts to claim images in stages of constant flux. With his time living in Indiana informing the work, Murray proposes to insert himself as an active member in the dialogue of the town's erratic timeline informed by his own personal history. Placing the memory-derived work in the context of this historical setting, the artist intends to acknowledge the complicated relationships that image-making within painting has and can have for how we see and edit the past.