Laura Watt Ellie Murphy Björn Meyer-Ebrecht
April 14 - May 19th Opening Reception April 14 6-9PM Gallery open by appointment
This show began with an invitation to Laura Watt to both exhibit her work and to invite another artist of her choice with whom to show. Watt selected Ellie Murphy. Murphy received the same combined invitation, and she invited Björn Meyer-Ebrecht. The relationships between the works of the artists have a similar linear connection.
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Laura Watt’s paintings have long been an investigation of pattern, repetition, and overlapping structures. For Watt, pattern and repetition are a means of condensing information and experience, compressing language, narrative, and emotion. Laura notes:” We find so many patterns in the geographical world – and it is pattern that allows us to comprehend the landscape. We use a grid to map our physical world and we can also use the grid to imagine and create new spaces. So, rather than yoking the grid and pattern’s ability to condense – I am looking at how it can create space and speak concretely of the infinite.”
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Laura Watt’s and Ellie Murphy’s work share a similar interest in repetition, compression and expansion as Murphy’s work shifts from the representations within Watt’s paintings to the presentation of sculptural installations. Murphy braids the yarn, compressing together the colors and linear qualities and expands the braids and yarns as they occupy three-dimensional space. Murphy explains how her work relates both to the personal and cultural nostalgia, “I combine references to doll hair, crafts, folk motifs and Americana from my 1970’s childhood in Kansas with aspects of Modern, Conceptual, Multicultural and Feminist art. I see an interdependence between the multiplicity of cultures in our world and use the process of braiding as a way of playing with the unintended and humorous connections between them.”
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Ellie Murphy’s and Björn Meyer-Ebrecht’s work share a power to evoke nostalgia, Murphy with her braiding and Meyer-Ebrecht through his black and white photography representing historic images of West Germany. His work deals with abstraction as something that is both sculptural and painterly. Meyer-Ebrecht creates strong shapes of color within the photographic images that become a somewhat difficult-to-define power or authority. These shapes remind of remnants from a language from another time which we are only partially able to understand.
As each of the artists chose to show with one another, there are threads that connect the works and the viewer can experience some of this dialogue between the works. Formally the work moves from the Laura Watt’s paintings of repetition and patterns to Ellie Murphy’s installations of repeated braids and patterns of colored yarns. Björn Meyer-Ebrecht’s work bridges the media of painting and sculpture and connects to the abstraction of Murphy’s and Watt’s work while also launching into the representational world of the past.