Statements

Burton Wasserman
Art Critic, NJ

Jo Owens Murray has an uncanny knack for joining objective awareness with subjective impulses in order to shape artworks rich with sensitive human feeling and significant social commentary. She has developed an idiom entirely her own, one tree of debt to the style of any provincially academic art professors. Combining external sensory reality with suggestions for expressive form drawn from a deep reservoir of intuitive ideas, she makes sculpture that reflects what she has learned, both from her own life and from the accumulated interaction she has experienced with others in the world at large. The reach she brings to her unique vocabulary extends from the logical and the rational to a mysterious well spring of subconscious creative urges located within the substrata of her center most sinews.

Murray is well known in the Delaware Valley for the images she conceives with frequently hollow styrofoam figure forms that are covered with beads, bangles, brooches and buttons galore. For many years she has been hoping for a chance to present her work in New York City. That opportunity has finally come. Now, she is in the Ward-Nasse Gallery, 178 Prince St. New York

At first glance, Murray's doll forms may look rather naive. But, like the Jo Owens Murray has an uncanny knack for joining objective awareness with subjective impulses in order to shape artworks rich with sensitive human feeling and significant social commentary. She has developed an work of Paul Klee, Joan Miro and Joseph Comell, her sculpture is alive with subtle nuances of original iconography and discarded odds and ends taken from hither and yon. They have all been turned into inseparable parts of exquisitely mysterious, daringly inventive passages of poetic form in three dimensions.

Again and again, Murray breathes fresh, new life into the miscellaneous bits and pieces that emerge as the combined exterior appearance of her sculpture. In the manner of Louise Nevelson and Pablo Picasso, who transformed detritus found on the street into art, she also recycles what may seem to be grotesque trash into ecstatic treasure.

Perhaps in a dream you have seen variations of her figures when exercising your own capacity for fantasy. Maybe that's why some people believe they evoke a sense of deja vu. Apparently, they are images with a strange and bizarre universality.

Consider the selection titled "Dear." It's an animal-like presence with the head of a doe (deer) and a base made from a circle of straight arrow shafts. Between the top and the bottom of the artwork, the body is covered by a beaded coat adorned with a fur collar. A complex of mingled elements, it all adds up to a strange totality of lyrical serenity and troubled anxiety. The forms may tell us what we believe is real is actually an illusion. Quite possibly, the artwork masks an otherwise invisible state of existence, one that can only be appreciated for what it is when we go beyond the surface and seek to discover what lies deep down within our own interiors.

Murray may well be on the way to becoming a legend in her own life- time. Her gift for inventive expression dealing with the social psychology of contemporary issues regarding women as trophies, clothes horses, demon witches and victims of alienation is filled with passionate conviction and steadfast determination.

Murray's ability to charge erotic identity with insights resulting from the passage of time and the consequences of a shifting state of mind are rarely given the esthetic spice and excitement she brings to what they're about. And who else gives authenticity to the notion of belonging to the human family with such a touch of humor and so much definitive grace? Frankly, I think it's very fair to say, "Few other artists can make sculpture so extraordinarily able to run both red hot and cool blue at the self-same moment!"