Irish artist Rosalind Murray creates playful, intimate and poetic narratives through performance.
Murray draws and sings her way around the urban environment of the City of Cambridge, and the rural environment of her hometown, Carlow, in the river Barrow valley in Ireland. Lateral Canal Ahead is a poetic detour of gallery works and live performances made on and around train tracks in Cambridge and canal tracks in Carlow. Within these frames, Murray finds inspiration and curiosities from a parallel past of industry that shapes our lives and landscapes. Lateral Canal Ahead, takes place October 11 through December 9, 2011 at the CAC Gallery at the Cambridge Arts Council, 344 Broadway, 2nd Floor.
The Artist Reception on Thursday, October 13, 6:00pm-8:00pm features a performance by Rosalind Murray. More performances in Cambridge will take place the week of October 11, 2011. For a schedule of events, please visit www.cambridgeartscouncil.org or call the Cambridge Arts Council at 617-349-4380.
One of the historical curiosities that Rosalind Murray unearths in Cambridge is the 19th-century ice harvesting operations at Fresh Pond. From the 1850s until 1945, frozen water was harvested in blocks from the pond, packed tightly onto trains, transported to boats, and sent off to destinations as far as the Middle East. The infrastructure of train tracks laid to facilitate this trade shaped the outline and foundation for the landscape of Cambridge and surrounding towns we experience today.
Murray considers the similarities with her home in Ireland. Upon first impression, the town appears to be an idyllic and picturesque rural landscape. However, upon deeper inspection, Carlow is a similarly mediated environment; constructed to distribute agricultural produce and sugar from the river Barrow valley, using a system of bridges, train tracks and forty-six miles of lateral canals and locks to make a track through the interior of the country to the sea.
In Lateral Canal Ahead, Murray uses the existing infrastructure of both places to distribute a trade of painterly qualities, framed in a journey of performance, drawing, story and song to explore and play with industrial history and environmental aesthetics.
The resulting series of videos, included in the installation, draw on Murray’s making of compositions and paintings in the color fields around Carlow and the former ice field in Cambridge including her works titled, "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow & Blue, & Green, & Grey?", "Sugar Wos Ear" and "Ice Field Baby!"
Although all trade lines in relationships eventually change or close, the structures of these historic distribution lines often remain in and below the surface. Lateral Canal Ahead is a way to re-open these channels using creative process to take us around Cambridge and Carlow simultaneously.
Rosalind Murray invites participants in this journey to the Lateral Canal Ahead “to row your boat, or come on a train, paint a color field around an ice field, and to a-bridge, left keep or Super-Duper!”
Rosalind Murray is an Irish artist who exhibits and performs in Europe and the US. Her background includes visual communication and animation, and since attending Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing and graduating with an MFA Painting from RISD in 2009, her practice pans and shifts the grounds available to set works and performance fluidly between public space and the gallery. Presenting idiosyncratic visual, verbal and aural mixes in a variety of mediums including drawing, video, painting, photography, sculpture and poetry, almost always combined with songs and an element of performance. Murray's works layer site and time generated response, an eclectic mix of material from her environment, personal and playful exploration, with a wide, somewhat wild trawl of cultural references thrown in for good measure. “Bicycle Drawing and Other Lines” was created and performed with the work of Irish sculptor Michael Warren, for Visual Centre of Contemporary Art in Ireland and in New York, she composed and sung performance drawings on a block in Williamsburg, staging the finale with a local opera soloist singing from his apartment window.
CAC Gallery hours:
M, W: 8:30 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.; T, TH: 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.; F: 8:30 a.m. - Noon
CAC Gallery is located in the Cambridge City Hall Annex at 344 Broadway, at the corner of Broadway and Inman Street. Metered parking is available on Inman Street and Broadway.
Directions via MBTA: Take the MBTA Red Line to Central Square. At street level proceed west on Massachusetts Avenue (towards Harvard Square) to Inman Street. Turn right and proceed north for four blocks to Broadway. Turn left and walk one block to Inman Street.
CAC will provide auxiliary aids and service, written materials in alternate formats, and reasonable modifications in policies and procedures to persons with disabilities upon request. CAC does not discriminate on the basis of disability.
The Cambridge Arts Council is supported in part by the City of Cambridge, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency, the Cambridge Community Foundation, Carlow County Council, and Artisan.
Comments