Wil Murray Artist Statements

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One night I heard from a writer friend a description of our bodies as houses, haunted by ghosts. This image stuck with me. So I sang "There's A Ghost In My House" by R. Dean Taylor over and over.  I thought about the feeling I get when crossing the threshold of the studio door, and the feeling I get when I look at photos of my paintings.

Photographs of my paintings act on me like pictures of a lover or photos of myself. I look at them as if I could see around or past the subject, into its hands or mouth.  Or maybe just a little further up its leg, down its blouse. Into its shadows. I look into the things that turned me on and sent me to the photo in the first place.

I make over-stimulated paintings that scare away from themselves, toward the distant seduction of their portrayal as photographs. Photographs that give enough shadow so that one is passionately drawn back to their real surfaces,  quietly haunted by a relationship to the pornographic likeness - to be horrified, delighted and titillated all over again. Paintings that fill to burtsing the tawdry landscape behind the flat window pane or the circus tent's flap. Like viewing a a landscape with a Claude glass, I wish to send the viewer back and forth between their own fleshy eyes, and mechanical or digital surrogates.

I wish to haunt and be haunted and wish again to haunt back. I exhaust watching in order to better look.

Winter, 2009