This content was published: October 4, 2012. Phone numbers, email addresses, and other information may have changed.
Heather D. Freeman: Mamma’s Boy and Jeff Murphy: Dig
Cascade Paragon Arts Gallery
- Dates: October 4 to November 8, 2012
- Gallery reception: Thursday, October 4, 5-7pm
- Location: Cascade Gallery, Terrell Hall Room 102
- Gallery hours: 9am-5pm, Monday – Friday
“Dig” by Murphy and “Mamma’s Boy” by Freeman, both of Charlotte, North Carolina, explore the nature of parenthood and childhood in relation to the non-familial world. We (at least in the United States) live in a society that paradoxically lauds family as the core of all social values and yet resists supporting the needs of working parents and childhood education. At the same time, during our son’s first three years of life, we witnessed significant environmental and social crisis that his generation (and no doubt future generations as well) would inherit. We each separately began to explore issues of environment, learning, language, family and custodianship in relationship to the growth of both parent and child. The resulting works are similar in their visual density, complexity and media, but vary in their resolution to these conceptual concerns.
Jeff Murphy: Nut
In his Dig series, Murphy combines charcoal drawings with digital photographs in Photoshop to create surreal and unsettling landscapes of discarded industrial technologies and decaying organic matter. Like the 16th century Dutch still-life painters exploring ideas of death, change and decay through their painterly representations of bones, fruit, and dead animals, Murphy explores the dynamic between industrial forms and their decay, ultimately creating industrial vanitases. But these vanitases are often contextualized in the world of toddler playthings, with tricycles, toy trucks and toddler himself as stand-ins for adult iterations. These works are all roughly 14”x42” digital prints on cotton poplin, mounted on wood and then coated with wax. They also exist online as virtual 360 degree panoramas.
Heather Freeman: Tractor
In Mamma’s Boy, Freeman developed an elaborate back-and-forth between digital and physical collages, resulting in large (44”x100”) prints on tyvek, which are cut to their irregular edges and screwed directly to the wall. Freeman is very interested in the relationship between language and image. As their son, Quinn’s, language skills went through developmental explosion shortly after his second birthday, Freeman began cataloging his linguistic discovers. In this series she reinterprets her son’s verbal worldview by taking his concerns and considerations (trucks, dinosaurs, owls, etc.) and translating them into her own concerns (fossil fuels, locally grown food, etc.) in both analogue and digital formats. Although the works are very large, there is an extremely high degree of detail in them. Reflecting how toddlers experience the world does not separate the macro- and microcosmic. These works also exist in a smaller framed 16”x20” edition.
– Above excerpted from Heather D. Freeman and Jeff Murphy’s writing on their work.