The Strange Catalog Text That Will Keep Us Together

I've posted Jacqueline Mabey's fantastic essay on my work from my exhibition she curated at the Belkin Satellite in March.
This is easily my favourite piece of writing about my work. Jacqueline spent nearly a year traveling to my studio and exhibitions researching and listening while I told tall drunken tales about burning studios and late nights with one-legged bikers.

" Since it is superfluous to the ends-means rationality of capitalism at its most base form, art’s very existence – its continued existence – proves the insufficiency of dominant ordering narratives. As the excesses of auction week attest, art can be a part of reproducing said ordering narratives. Nonetheless, it undercuts the fiction that there is only one way that the world can be organized. In its polysemic generosity, the painting of Wil Murray does not foreclose on the viewer’s possible interpretations, possible emancipations, that moment of disassociation with a socially constructed subjective position. Its everyday associations and the bodily confrontations it stages with the viewer propound that the emancipatory moment is not something out there at a cerebral remove, but possible within us in the most quotidian moments and spaces"

From: Jacqueline Mabey, "the strange space that will keep us together: Painting and the Possibility of Postmodern Utopias" Vancouver: Belkin Satellite, 2008.
Available as PDF or .doc file.

*A note on the photo, it is Fred Herzog. I saw his exhibition while in Vancouver for my Belkin Show. Virtually everyone I know who has lived in East Vancouver now owns his book and uses as memory.

Interview Posted

Nearly a year old, the interview done with Jacqueline Mabey in May of 2007 is now posted at wilmurray.com, or download the PDF here.
This is the interview that appears in the artist binder at the current show in Vancouver.

Which New Painting?

To chase the new, to value the contemporary is as intentional as deciding to be an ancient Egyptian. Don’t put it past me, bouffant black hair, eyes ringed in black, holding a staff or a can of beer, maybe.
Historical movements, constructed in the workshop of art history, are encapsulated, started and finished without us. We are positioned after their occurrence. Our claims to contemporary practices are made by our proximity to their inception, how soon we knew them, how early we believed them. In historical movements, we are given the relief of a death never felt in person, in new work, the hope of a birth without a life we’re responsible to. Unless we really like the baby.
I’ve not really not been a fan of new painting. By the same token, I am not a fan. In fact, I’ve always loved new painting as much I needed to in order to paint, and show my work, and feel less alone. I've loved new painting to capacity while I wondered which "New Painting" the internal imaginary interviewer was asking about.
I understand most easily new painting when I can see it within miles of my home. I can imagine how the work got there after the last show on the same walls, and can ask questions that ground the work near my own. “Where is his studio?” “Where are they from? Here? Where I'm from?”
I have to figure out less about the how when I see new paintings nearby. Old men don’t travel to other cities to watch construction sites, the most interesting ones are found nearest to your house because you can remember last week when the street wasn’t a gaping pit and you crossed it where you liked as long as the cars weren’t trying to kill you.
Maybe old men would travel if they could. Maybe old men who watch construction sites have been broke so long that travel doesn't even enter the equation. Maybe they keep their minds of travel down at the construction site, watching with the other old men. Now I'm just being cute like Calvino, or the lyrics to all that new adult contemporary music coming from Canada.

I like painting.
No much of it, though.
They hit hardest near to home.
It is hard to tell with paintings, when they all hang on the wall kind of the same, when they are from. The smell can give it away.
Sometimes the smell gives away that they were painted last week.

I go to galleries a lot. More than I go to movies, less than I imagine art historians go. Mostly I go on sunny days when I am in another city, or on Tuesdays when I am in Montreal.
I keep trying to walk into a gallery and have this all change. To be knocked on my ass and care more about what did it than my ass pain. Or my embarrassment. That's like feeling self-concious when you're drunk, and trying to drink it away because you heard that booze lowers your inhibitions
Maybe this is why I don't collect painting.


* The top photo is from the opening of "the strange space that keeps us together" at the Belkin Satellite. In the photo is Colin, Me , and Jacqueline Mabey. I don't know who took it. The show is still up and you should all go see it before April 6th.

Dragon Fruit, Rose Apples, Roseeeeee, Lions Eating Horses

As I am in Vancouver, with a stomach full of unfamiliar exotic fruits and cheese and wine, I am apt to give answers to interviews a little differently than usual.
Andrea Carson over at VoCa sent me 5 interview questions, and reviewed my work a bit on her blog. Vancouver cast a long shadow over the answers to these questions, read them here.
I am overjoyed to be heading into my opening tomorrow at the Belkin Satellite with a post on my work that includes and image of "Lion Attacking a Horse".
See you there.

Upcoming Solo Exhibition: "The Strange Space That Will Keep Us Together" Vancouver, BC

the strange space that will keep us together

Wil Murray

8 March to 6 April 2008

Opening reception Friday March 7, 8 to 10 pm

the strange space that will keep us together is a survey exhibition of emerging, Montreal-based painter Wil Murray. The exhibition consists of a selection of works made after the July 2003 destruction by fire of his West Pender Street studio space, the historic Pender Auditorium, to the present day. In his work, Murray picks up the dropped threads of abstract modern painting, playfully subverting its dogma, while seriously re-engaging its central themes.

Murray’s work explores the horrors of banal choices. In every choice, there is an element of madness. The most reasoned decision is still a leap of faith into an unknowable future- a leap which is never made alone, as its consequences ripple out. Paint is poured onto a support, slowly built up layer by layer, sections are cut out and tacked onto other works. Marks are made and effaced, at some points visible, at others concealed. A story is told, but the tale is not straightforward. Against mastery, against autonomy, Murray’s process is suggestive of the tension between the terror of the contingency of identity and the spaces caused by incommensurable differences.

Wil Murray was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta. He attended the Alberta College of Art + Design for two years before moving to Vancouver to open a studio. Murray was short-listed for the RBC Painting Competition (2005) and was included in the Magenta Foundation’s Carte Blanche Vol. 2: Painting (2007). Represented by the Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Murray’s work is included in collections in Canada and the United States.

This exhibition is curated by Jacqueline Mabey, a candidate to the Masters Degree in Critical and Curatorial Studies at The University of British Columbia.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Alvin Balkind Fund for Student Curatorial Initiatives, the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, and the Faculty of Arts at The University of British Columbia, STRESSLIMITDESIGN, the Program in Canadian Studies at The University of British Columbia, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Lotus Hotel Limited, and the UBC Alma Mater Society.

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For further information please contact: Julie Bevan at julie.bevan@ubc.ca,
tel: (604) 822-3640, or fax: (604) 822-6689

Belkin Satellite Gallery Website

No Album More Calgary

Lots to tell once I am home from Calgary.
News, opening night photos, and much more.
In the meantime, just listening to Walker Brothers - Nite Flights and checking out the page for my Vancouver solo show in March at the Belkin Satellite.