EXHIBITIONS IN SIGHT

Art Matters

by

Burton Wasserman

Decidedly surrealistic and often fortified with a lively charge of pop style whimsy, the artworks of Jo Owens Murray grab hold of your attention with a mordant intensity and brilliance of color. Over a dozen different pieces, hand crafted in her studio during the past couple of years, comprise a superb solo exhibition scheduled for display between December 4 and January 17 at the Philadelphia Art Alliance.

Examples of such soundly exercised creative acumen do not come along very often. They are certainly not typical of the tiresomely repetitious pieces of esthetic boredom seen all too frequently in the exhibition scene. Instead, they are fanciful assemblages in 3D whose formulation was driven by deeply rooted layers of personal memory, thought and feeling, joined with reflections on the various roles played by women in society, past and present.

In addition, her work is refreshingly free of the superficial clichés and dated mannerisms imposed on students in many post-secondary school studio art courses. Instead of putting up with such tedious foolishness, Murray's main focus of study when she attended college was art history which enabled her to explore ideas and accomplishments brought to fulfillment at the highest levels of esthetic realization.

Pursuing a distinctively original idiom today, the heart of her approach consists of taking debris destined for a junk heap and transforming it into an eloquently expressive statement. The famous bull's head relief sculpture of Picasso, made from the discarded handlebars and seat of an old bicycle, is an interesting precedent for her work. A somewhat different example of art by a great master, also pertinent to Murray's oeuvre, is the well-known fourteen year old dancer sculpture by Degas in which a human shape cast in bronze has had exterior ornamentation in the form of a ballet costume and a silken hair ribbon attached to it.

In Murray's world of art, miracles that would never turn up in an ordinary, everyday environment occur with bold frequency. By and large, her pieces are made by joining beads, baubles and bangles to foundations provided by display mannequins or figure forms used for dressmaking. What emerges are deeply moving statements about externally decorated women who receive no credit for the complex of thoughts and emotions they live with inside the envelope of their skin.

"Side Show" is an excellent case in point. It is a riveting image of a woman functioning as a circus performer. Since she has neither arms nor legs she must remain mounted on a wagon with a handle that has to be pulled by someone else if she is to get anywhere. Until then, she can only stay wherever she was left the last time someone moved her. Totally dependent on others, the figure is an object of either amusement or entertainment, with no meaningful depth of existence beyond the apparent reality of an overt appearance. As a poetic metaphor, the ruby lipped beauty is rich with overtones of meaning variously encountered in the human scheme of things.

"Love Hurts" is a violin shaped figure with one hand holding a pointed arrow in lieu of a bow. A small heart-shaped form is attached where her vagina would be if she was a real person instead of an esthetic effigy. The rest of the piece is an exuberant melange of multicolored beads, their sparkle all aglitter with chromatic energy and visual vitality.

In addition to the take-offs based on women, Murray has also put together bejeweled horses, naturally of feminine gender. "Fantasy," for example, is a fascinating production, replete with pistols, one each in a holster on either side of her body. Of course, these weapons are useless to the beast because she has no hands with which to make them work. Instead, it manifests itself as an idealized creature, bedecked with massive quantities of magnetic attraction and a hopeless inability to transcend her state of permanently imposed silence. Again, the metaphor provides a monumental measure of heartfelt expression no matter how speechless the forms may otherwise seem to be.

It is very evident Murray doesn't make art from a vacuum. Again and again, she poses questions about the roles assigned beautiful women in society who find themselves trapped and victimized by circumstance and even biology. Cherished principally as depersonalized Barbie dolls, idolized for their heat but despised and rejected because of their light, they are often doomed to being used rather than respected. Repeatedly categorized by a set of three double digits, many even find themselves suffering emotional torment and the agonies of domestic violence. Little wonder such barbaric treatment renders them frozen from within, divested of the potentiality for mature wholeness of being that should be their birthright. All of these considerations come into focus in "Venus on the Half Shell," a modern day evocation of the renaissance period masterpiece, "The Birth of Venus" by Sandro Botticelli in the Uffizi Galleries of Florence, Italy.

Within the past year, notable selections by Murray have been acquired for the permanent collection of several major institutions including the Woodmere in Philadelphia and the National Museum of Women in the Arts at Washington, D.C. Others are very likely to follow suit in the near future. Thoughtful visitors to the show at the Art Alliance will have no difficulty understanding why. All of which is why wise collectors have a golden opportunity to obtain choice pieces while the getting is still eminently reasonable.

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