TOPS Gallery, 2017

That Shadow, My Likeness, a title borrowed from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, engages sight, sound, and the passing of time. Murray's intimate color portraits, still lifes, and audibly dense video, Slaying, consider sequential, cyclical, and repetitive nature. Murray's exhibit at Tops consisted of a small group of photographs along with a video inspired by the footage she shot of her husband's audition tape for the metal band Slayer. As both an observer and a participant, Murray uses the material of her world to transform her people and terrain into a heightened narrative.

Through a controlled use of color, form, and repetition Murray creates a mysterious metre from her familiar subjects. Her work in the show at Tops included a portrait of her son with his arm in a red cast, posing sans shirt, against a red wall and a still life of that same cast, cast aside, coolly shot in bright winter light. Other portraits describe a young boy displaying his hand as it casts an abstracted shadow across his torso, while another shows a woman gazing intently, "waiting for Pope Francis", as she cradles her weathered hands in sober anticipation. The video, Slaying, depicts the artist's husband, drummer Ed Klinger, rehearsing the Slayer song "disciple" with vigorous concentration. This work echoes through the anteroom gallery into the main gallery mirroring qualities shared in the photographs.