Last Friday evening I had the pleasure of seeing a new group show in Boston that goes by the title APATHIE. My post this month focuses on Jennifer Murphy's installation work here. She is both an exhibitor and champion behind the project.
Some art sticks like glue once met, or maybe, could it just be new air, floating around something significant that was allowed through an open door? Peripheral to the entrance I encountered what feels like a complex breeze. I hear its whispering notes, a contemporary Song of Hiawatha. Murphy weaves threads from a void into matter. Like an apparition, there are pieces left to witness, but not an entire form.
This beauty realized is a drink from the melancholy wine of remembrance. The artist's own hair adorns the main gauzy element and the walls of this tomb. Intimate feminine objects are frayed like the threads barely holding things together, yet they carry no stain of life force. These materials speak directly to me and to my own relationship to animal bones and hide. This kind of practice suggests an archaeology in the spirit of Love After Death.
Many days later, this encounter still sits beside me, accompanying, materializing in those empty spaces of ether that circulate around singular experiences: the morning cup of tea being drunk, a piece of toast masticated. Murphy's visual poetry hovers, follows, and sits like a spectre. I am not alone. My friend, the sound of silence sits with me, dulling the incessant din outside with its open maw. It commands my attention and I readily give it.
The show's title suggests lack of interest and emotion. The work presented is a stark contradiction to that concept when placed alongside the evidence presented. The construction of Apathie's disinterested, honest skeleton-dancing together with a spirit of loss and reverence in the highest order-is what Feminism is all about... if you ask me. Tell it like it is, tell us how you feel. Bravo.
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