Cive Murphy - Scapes - Magnan Projects

This is a short piece written for Murphy's first solo exhibition in New York. It contains elements of a longer essay which can be found on an earlier post.

Clive Murphy - Scapes



The work of Clive Murphy concerns itself with both site and surface - not only the position of the individual within an increasingly ‘mass’ oriented environment but also the contours, the landscapes through which this environing is revealed. Exploring themes of hierarchy, inter-relationality and meaning formation, he infiltrates sites of visual signification with a combination of pathos and incongruity, reconstituting ideological, cultural and rhetorical systems in an effort to situate anew a sense of human space.

Murphy’s practice draws from the peripheries of visual culture, mining such diverse sources as porn spam, folk art, found audio cassette tape, technical drawings and fairground inflatables. He appropriates and reconfigures familiar signifiers in order to explore their wider cultural resonance, uncovering new ground for the proliferation of diverse meanings.



His methodology centers around the expansion and abstraction of the concept or genre of ‘landscape’ as it relates to environment in a cultural and semiological sense. And while the conscious embrace of low culture displays a debt to Pop Art it also points beyond this by illustrating relationships between Pop Art and landscape

Operating in a characteristically lo-fi manner, using materials and techniques that exist quite far down on the artistic food chain, he strives for ends greater than the sums of their parts in an effort to elevate and democratise.

Murphy’s work has consistently engaged with questions concerning the individual’s position within the sheer mass of information facing us, the gravitational pull of these signifiers and sites of meaning, and the way in which the individuals relationship to their environment is colored, if not wholly determined by the social and cultural forces with which we may negotiate but rarely control. Yet despite these sources of alienation, Murphy displays no resignation. His work precisely embodies a negotiation with these cultural forces, a negotiation that, despite the seriousness of Murphy’s intent, is shot through with a playfulness that creates a space for reconfigured modes of interaction and new possibilities of artistic experience.