Decorating walls...at the studio: The albatros and the unusable

If you paint it on the wall, it is very hard to move to the gallery. If you coat sprayfoam in green paint and glitter, you'll wind up with an object usable only as an example of going too far(lucky charms brain).

Decorating walls...at the studio: Mixed bag above the paint table

photobooth image of Julia, mampe elephant, scared-child brand candy wrapper, phtoshopped painting images, under-the-sea national geographic clipping

Decorating walls...at the studio: My art-crush pinups

Shary Boyle lopped out of a magazine

Decorating walls...at the studio: Colour Tests

Decorating walls...at the studio: New Painting Titles, scrawled

Decorating walls...at the studio: Introduction

When I used to have an apartment, I hated putting things on the walls. Now that I don't I enjoy that someone else has. I can't figure out what I would hang on my own walls. I don't really ever want something in a way that would mean toting it home and hanging in on my wall.
I've been in my studio over five years now. I have some things on the wall, and I took some photos today of what, over five years,has made it's way to the wall and stayed....beyond paintings, of course.

ESSE Magazine 25th Anniversary Auction

"Baby Ghost From the 1900s Says Beat It With Your Chain"(pictured above) will be featured in ESSE magazine's 25th anniversary auction this fall. Happening November 11th, at the Musee Des Beaux Arts in Montreal. This piece will also be exhibitied in my show at Galerie PUSH in September.

Details: Baby Ghost From The 1900s Saya Beat It With Your Chain. Acrylic & Foam on Board. 60” X 73” X 8” (click on image fore larger version)

Interview with Megan Bradley of Galerie PUSH

Axis posted an interview called

Do we still need to bother about feminism?

Oh, it's perfect that large!
The interview included Megan Bradley, the director of Galerie PUSH here in Montreal.
I am currently working on my exhibition for the gallery, that will open the 10th of September. Tentatively called "We Pet Your Cat To Death?", and exhibition text is being written by Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf.

I kept this under an ill-fitting hat

In honour of my show opening tonight, I'll reveal the daytime's Clark Kent to the nightime's Superman. I was a VICE Magazine "Do". Somehow this just makes me daydream of Snagglepuss and remember that Nu Pogodi is my only style hero left. Gravy Boat Bandit indeed.

This Haunted House Is Not A Haunted Home

This Haunted House Is Not A Haunted Home:

New Works by Wil Murray

April 23rd to May 9th, 2009
Opening Reception April 23rd 6pm-8pm

Diane Farris Gallery
1590 W. 7th Avenue
Vancouver, Canada
V6J 1S2
tel (604) 737-2629

Exhibition Preview

Exhibition Statement:

“Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.' I must admit that this last word is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, more disturbing than I intended. Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am”

From Nadja, Andre Breton

I am a haunted house painter.
One night I heard from my writer friend a description of our bodies as houses, haunted by ghosts. This image stuck with me, and became parasite or symbiont to my memory of Breton’s lines. So I sang "There's A Ghost In My House" by R. Dean Taylor over and over and thought: The studio door disembodies. It invites visitation.
My own seduction by photography haunts me. Photographs of my paintings linger in me like a portrait of a lover or of myself. I am captivated by them, gazing as if I could see around or past the subject, into its hands or mouth, or into shadows. Or maybe just a little further up its leg, down its blouse. Into a privately known place that the photographic portrait will not show. What was past my eyes. What turned me on and sent me to the photo in the first place.
For this exhibition I’ve made dripping, tumescent, over-stimulating paintings that at first horrify away from themselves, toward the safe seduction of their portrait. But this printed flatness bores nearly as quickly as it is consumed, and once desirous of girth, weight and threat, one is drawn back to the painting in a lather - calm and collected after privately completing a seduction/consumption narrative, but quietly haunted by a relationship to the pornographic likeness - to be horrified, delighted and titillated again.
The paintings are named for anonymous ghosts. Titles function as clues to the forms taken by my spectral companions that just hung there as I paced from painting to portrait and back again.
I wish for paintings that send a viewer to flat portraits to swoon as I had, and to wish, as I did, for a return to the discomfort of their own grinning movements with the very real painting. I wish to share my own queezy seduction by ghosts by becoming myself a spectral seducer to others.
I wish to haunt and be haunted and wish again to haunt back.

* image shown: "February Is An Annual Race To The Bottom Aroun Here" Mixed Media Collage, 7" X 12", 2009(click image for larger version)

Why I Don't Ride A Bicycle

The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding on iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them at you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.

-The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brien

New Painting: What The Dents In Your Head Can Tell Us

(click image to see larger version)

What The Dents In Your Head Can Tell Us, 2009
52" X 43" X 6", Acrylic & Foam On Board

New Painting: "Cathode Ray Cure For The Lust-Bent Hangover"

(click image to see larger version)

Cathode Ray Cure For The Lust-Bent Hangover, 2009
62" X 53" X 9", Acrylic & Foam On Board