VANESSA MURRAY
Vanessa Murray is an abstract painter based in Carrboro, NC. She is currently a 2017 MFA Candidate in Studio Art at UNC Chapel Hill. Murray was living and working in South Florida for several years after finishing her BFA with a graduating fellowship from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. Murray has shown her work at venues such as the Contemporary Art Workshop in Chicago, IL, the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, FL as well as the Carrack Modern in Durham, NC. Murray’s work promotes slowing down the process of looking through the subtle visual differences in her paintings. Gradually built up layers of paint and quiet variations in color and texture become suggestive of geologic formations and cavernous forms through accumulative compositional decisions.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I’m interested in the physical presence of painting. The surfaces of my work are important. They are topographical, even sculptural in recent work, intending to reward close looking and investigation. I’m fascinated how accumulative processes of material determine the formation of positive and negative spaces over time. When cavities or caves form, an effect is created in which the relationship between inside and outside, positive and negative, even past and present begin to compete for attention. I create numerous layers with plaster type materials that are formed from repetitive movements, often from just a single tool. Having one primary application method emphasizes the complexities that can occur from a singular process. I often think about such physical and chemical processes as erosion, fossilization, calcification, and ultimately the big picture of how things form and become what they are over epoch periods of time. The result are forms that drift between certain dualities: vacant yet solid, ethereal yet earthly, weightless yet topographical. The amassing of layers become suggestive of geologic formations; cavernous and corporeal forms. Both suggest a feeling of anticipation, of being in flux.
Every material decision that is applied is a response to the surface that comes before it. I’m interested in creating work that attests to their own state of becoming, asking the viewer to participate in the event. This state of becoming is expressed to the viewer in that my work asks to slow down the process of looking through subtle visual differences in color, texture, Iight and dark. My color palate engages largely with various saturations of color, or rather their desaturation. I am promoting a certain sense of time unfolding in my work that is a very slow one; a compressed time of glacial speed.
My drawing process is in close conversation with my paintings, but through a different approach. They are also about an accumulative effect; an accumulation of form through individual meticulous marks over time. I think about them as peculiar growths. They are perpetually in transition. My work engages with a slowness of process, but also with the slowness of perception.
available work
