Wil Murray Artist Statements

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Now I am a reluctant painter because I have a lot of paint in my studio and the work always hangs back to the wall. I abandon the rectangle, spend days weaving fabric to be glued onto my work, and spend other days photographing drapery to collage back in. My interests in painting have expanded from a practice of performed modernism, to the maintenance of the performance and its reception by viewers in person and in those in absentia, mediated by the camera’s lens. My interests are now moving toward the performance, the reception and the social constructions they build and exist in…both in person and in absentia

I make my work as a builder would, were he asked to. I construct paintings. To follow a mark painted in my studio: I paint a single wide brushstroke on a pane of glass, paint layers of gloss medium on top and peel the brushstroke up from the pane as a skin and cut it out. This days-old cut out brush stroke is applied to the work alone or in combination with others, and often photographed once permanently attached. This photograph of a brush stroke is printed and the brush stroke cut out and applied next to the original paint brush stroke.

I am far from the directness of paint applied to painting.I do paint like that. But I never only paint like that. I find making paintings painful in much the same way that living in a city and watching what you love disappear in fires, disinterest, economic upswings and legislation. This also goes for cities one used to live in.

I make a single decision at the beginning that necessitates another, and then a few thousand more. I set out from the first decision, steering toward my own complete blindness/absence where an imagined viewer will walk in a half circle in front of what I have made, looking; or an end where a viewer is never in the same room as the work, but watches it among thousands of other images on a screen.

I have been fascinated by redemption strategies and original sin, and the thing in front of the thing

My concepts are borrowed and temporary, except when they won’t leave. I often draw from language problems, especially between languages. I seek strangeness and otherness, but this just means I have to dedicate myself to familiarity and comfort. I like forgetting things an breaking tools only slightly less than remembering properly or using with skill.