JO OWENS MURRAY
Graziella Marchicelli,
Ph.D.
Fine Arts Curator, Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art
The Surrealist inclination to aestheticize found objects and often juxtapose incongruent ones led to the experimentation of department store mannequins as art objects—a natural choice considering the mannequin’s malleability. In the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, organized by Paul Eluard, Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp at the Galerie Beaux-Arts, the Surrealists presented department store mannequins as apparitions d'etres-objets (phantom object-beings).1 André Masson’s female mannequin attracted the most attention. “Her head is imprisoned in a bird cage…her mouth masked, with a pansy directly over the opening... She cannot speak; she is entrapped even as she is decorated, wearing at once too much and too little, dressed up and dressed down, naked and rendered mute, added to and subtracted from, but most of all entrapped” The female mannequin was the Surrealists’ readymade plaything—tamed, silent and submissive.
The female mannequin has also fascinated Jo Owens Murray. A self-taught artist, Murray received a Bachelor of Arts in art history from Rosemont College, Pennsylvania in 1993, and managed Rosemont College’s Women’s Center until she decided to become a full time artist. Born in Durham, North Carolina, Murray left home at age nineteen, eventually settling in Pennsylvania where her family roots lie.
Although Murray started her career as a photographer, she was drawn to assemblage sculpture by way of experiments with various materials and fabrics. Murray’s assemblage sculptures, which she calls “the girls”, are unique and exceptional examples of contemporary Surrealism, and her application of beads and jewels adhered to mannequins is a pioneering technique. Her sculptures are heavily encrusted with large, brightly colored beads, buttons, mirrors, costume jewelry, plastic flowers, feathers, bridal veils and birdcages.
Murray defies the current art world’s tendency to pad each work with profuse rhetoric or lengthy statements. Although she states that her work is about specific concerns regarding women, she makes a point of stepping back and allowing room for viewer interpretation. Murray’s beaded sculptures prompt questions about beauty, femininity, identity, loss, grief and redemption. Her sculptures explore myths about women. Journalist Burton Wasserman wrote that Murray’s work has “deeply rooted layers of personal memory, thought and feeling, joined with reflections on the various roles played by women in society, past and present.” About herself, Murray says, “My sculptures reflect my own upbringing as a young girl, my fantasies combined with the realities of today.”
Murray’s beaded sculptures have many personae. They are warriors, princesses, mothers, brides and circus performers. “My work tells of the myth of how women should be seen and not heard. They should reflect only their external beauty. As women we have become more concerned with our outer appearance. That is why my girls are nothing more than empty, hollow shells; all they have is their outer beauty. Like the Surrealists, I have transformed women into fixtures. They are only parts and never whole.”
Bird in a Gilded Cage (1999) and Gateway to Your Soul (1998) depict female heads covered with bright, colorful jewels. In Bird in a Gilded Cage, a woman’s beautiful beaded and jeweled head is placed inside a cage decorated on one side with a garland of red flowers. Her left eye is a flower and her right a mirror. She has grapes wrapped around her neck and her mouth is sealed with a butterfly. The woman is pure ostentation, literally all glitz, and she is trapped. Murray describes the woman as “always pretty, always thin and always quiet.”
In Gateway to Your Soul, a beaded head hangs from a bird stand. The eyes are replaced with mirrors, allowing the viewer to see his or her own eyes. The bodiless woman suggests enchantment and seduction, but there is, at the same time, something menacing about her. Her collar is reminiscent of a spiderweb and the beads around her mirror-eyes suggest a mask. Carl Jung’s “dark side of the self” is hinted at here; it is “the most dangerous thing of all, precisely because the self is the greatest power in the psyche.”
Murray’s bejeweled assemblages of female mannequin heads, mannequin bodies and masks suggest a host of intriguing dualities: beauty/ugliness, virgin/harlot, predator/prey, human/automaton, among others. Let’s Play (2001), for example, brings to mind more than one duality. Half mannequin, half horse, Let’s Play is a mannequin torso with a horse’s head. The half human, half animal figure wears a wedding dress and is adorned from head to waist with jewels and beads. Murray’s horse-mannequin stands straight and looks ahead, oddly reminiscent of the host of mythological characters and deities of a zoomorphic nature: Bast, the cat-headed Egyptian goddess; Ganesha, the Hindu god with an elephant’s head; the Greek sphinx, a monster with a woman’s head and a lion’s body, just to name a few. Beyond the evident duality of man/animal, the juxtaposition of horse and wedding dress also suggests such dualities as power/innocence and passion/virginity.
Murray explores a variation of the old saying, “Clothes make the man.” Instead, she plays with the idea, “Clothes make the woman.” The mannequin bust, Material Girl (1997), is a self-absorbed beauty with high cheekbones and prominent, red lips sealed with a jewel. Similarly, Lady in Red (2001) also conveys conceit and vanity. Murray observes, “Jewelry provides a history of women through different style periods…We can look back to the earliest drawings, carvings and paintings, and you will always find women adorned with jewelry. We are always trying to enhance our appearance by adding pretty objects to cover our bodies.” Murray is critical of women who use jewelry to hide themselves; she asks “Have we turned ourselves into the object we wear?” Are we stopping others from seeing us, our true selves?
Murray leaves the observer with more questions than answers. The assemblages are highly evocative but forever puzzling. She approaches each work with a keen sense of intention and strategy, but, in the true spirit of Surrealism, she avoids easy answers for her viewers. Rather, she lets nuance, strangeness, unease and mystery abound.