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Sharpened senses >> R. Holland Murray's realm of totems and tools by KEITH MARCHAND
The work of R. Holland Murray lies strewn about the gallery of the Saidye Bronfman Centre, challenging the viewer to negotiate the room and inviting closer inspection. The three-part exhibition, Recent Works, is presented as part of Black History Month and features a fascination with totemic carving, Japanese wood joinery and densely worked drawings. Murray was born in Detroit and has been teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University since 1975. Never one to get bogged down with one particular approach to art production, he has worked prodigiously in a remarkable cross-section of media: painting, drawing, sculpture, lithography, furniture-making, etc. The series titled Parallaxé is perhaps the most interesting portion of the show. The pieces are deliberately difficult to categorize. At times resembling enormous and fearsome garden tools, they are also deliberately totemic. Their soft walnut patina suggests heavy use, yet their intricately worked shafts and artful geometry speak with the resonance of African statuary. Each spindly wooden sculpture has been imbued with a certain appearance of mystery: they are sign-posts, totem-poles, weapons and tools. Yet most of all, they represent the ritual of the creative process. The series entitled Vancouver Work comprises simple and elegant forms that perch like immense thistles on the gallery floor. Made of sharpened rods connected by a central axis, they have a dual effect on the viewer: they are strikingly beautiful, but also dangerous in a concrete sense. These works exist in that rarefied state in which the exquisite and the menacing co-exist, representing the (potentially) sublime nature of the lethal. We are once again shown the intentional polarities inherent in Murray's work. Accompanying the sculptural works is a series of drawings that appear on the gallery walls at irregular intervals. These are reflections of Parallaxé and Vancouver Work series, existing to buttress our understanding of the sculptures, forming a blueprint for the complex puzzle on the gallery floor. Elegant in their rich earthtones, Murray uses these compositions to further blur the lines surrounding his art. Actually, these drawings began as studies for his sculptural work, a notepad to the artist. It wasn't until he had finished a considerable number of these "sketches" that Murray decided that they were, in fact, a part of the overall work. R. Holland Murray's Recent Works avoids easy accessibility and facile categorization. His work is stark and threatening, artistic and tasteful. He knows that there are no absolutes. Especially not in human expression. R. Holland Murray: Recent Works is on until March 7 at the Liane and Danny Taran Gallery of the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts
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A jumble of peculiar angles and sharpened points, smooth oiled wood and carefully carved shanks--objects that are at once compelling and menacing. Like oversized tools or weapons worn down by the hand of an imagined user, enormous maces lean against walls and well-honed barbs lie in wait on the floor like thorny man-traps.