Caitlyn Murphy: Artifacts
Reception: Friday September 22nd, 7-9Pm
SEPTEMBER 21st - October 14th, 2023
Archive, Gouache On Paper, 15.25” x 12.25”, 2023
We are pleased to host Artifacts, a solo exhibition from Caitlyn Murphy. Please join us in celebrating this wonderful series with Caitlyn on
Friday September 22nd from 7-9PM.
Rummage, Gouache On Paper, 23” x 18.25”, 2023
“We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.”
— John Berger, Ways of Seeing
In the late winter of 2022 along St. Clair West, several tables lined the outer storefront of a narrow, elongated junk shop. Liquidation signs panned across the windows and the tables were stacked with small to mid-sized objects, some nestled within one another while others splayed out in chaotic sweeps. Under one particular pile of oddities, I spotted the corner of a wooden khatam picture frame, a traditional decorative style of inlaying from the Persian empire. It cost five dollars, and the artifact now sits on my living room side table where I see it every day.
***
Typically, there is nothing aspirational about clutter. In modernist culture, to have a minimalist space is to extend oneself towards clarity; the less materials we own, the more liberated we are. In Caitlyn Murphy’s exhibition Artifacts, the allure of minimalism and its greater representation – class designation, the irrelevance of objects, a commodified peace – is challenged and upended. Murphy opts, instead, for the bursting sensations behind memory and spatial timelines, in the way objects both familiar and obscure can unravel the stories that substrate our relationship to everything surrounding us.
Artifacts is a series of paintings that began in October 2021 when Murphy first walked by the same St. Clair West junk shop I did. She began documenting the scenes she saw through the powdery front window and was drawn to particular colours and shades. Murphy appreciates objects that require technical accuracy to depict their material; layers of glass and translucent items tightly packed alongside porcelain and paper call for patience from viewers to decipher. In this way, Artifacts is an exercise in slowing down. Murphy’s series of paintings demand intentional looking, asking the viewer to first hold onto the entire canvas at once, and then pull apart each detail – a completed jigsaw puzzle in reverse, where the image becomes clearer once separated into smaller pieces.
Over the course of two years, Murphy’s carefully detailed paintings became a progression of the junk shop’s eviction, a common occurrence in an increasingly unaffordable city. By honoring how a single location transforms over time, Artifacts is also a testament to home – a tribute to a former version of the places we loved. Each visit to the store yielded less and less objects as they were sold or tossed nearing its final days. In Murphy’s series, a repetition of materials can be seen throughout this timeline: the corner of wooden shelves and glass table tops with golden rims create continuity, and her objects seemingly spill from one canvas into the next. The works are vivid in colour and texture, yet appear almost coated in a film of dust, as though the viewer is looking through the shop window, just as Murphy did.
***
“We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.”
— John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Murphy is interested in archiving, as she moves through the city and catalogs moments that may be overlooked or simply unseen. Artifacts is the progression of one shop slowly shutting down, yet within each painting is the potential for new stories to be shared, a belief that every knick knack carries a past. A pile of fountain pens, a rusting harmonica, a compact mirror and sheets of artwork; the compilation of once deliberately purchased or handmade items discarded in the same place together. The junk shop, in direct opposition to the consciously marketed store, is less concerned with profit and more interested in the eccentric underbelly of charm, curiosity, and strangeness that exist in the hidden folds of gentrified cities and its people. For Murphy to record the arrangements she saw through the window is to make a memory, a walk, a place – permanent.
Where minimalist spaces tend to disguise the quirks of personality and flatten temporal indicators to allow for a sterilized mise en scène, collecting and keeping objects create the possibility of connection and story-building; whether it’s maintaining the personal histories evoked by specific items, or the recognition of someone else’s mementos as it relates to you, to them, and to the gaps in between. In ever-evolving and profit-driven cities, it can feel hard at times to identify with our surroundings, yet Murphy’s skillful eye captures the sensibilities that feel real and grounded in humanness. To archive is to value experiences, and Artifacts offers viewers a period of Murphy’s life where she witnessed and recorded the reshuffling of a small independent business during her walks, an intimate extension of what draws her in and shapes her reality. For viewers, there is a reminder that pausing and deliberately looking – until looking becomes seeing – can help shift away from isolation and instead build a web of closeness with our physical environment.
It feels special to hold a relationship with art, objects, and people. I see my handcrafted picture frame every day, and without knowing it at the time, it connected me to Murphy and circled back to this moment. A memory fixed in place, a story beginning.
– Exhibition text by Melina Sabeti-Mehr
Thank you to the Toronto Arts Council for their support of this exhibition.
Analog, Gouache On Paper, 18.25” x 15”, 2023
Caitlyn Murphy (b. Oakville, ON, 1988) received her B.Des from OCAD University, Toronto, and B.A. from McMaster University, Hamilton.
Recent exhibitions include Brackett Creek Exhibitions, Montana; Tchotchke Gallery, New York City; Dianna Witte; Toronto; Anchorage Museum, Alaska; Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto; No Foundation, Toronto; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta; Harbourfront Centre, Toronto; Mark Christopher Gallery, Toronto.
Her work has been supported by grants provided by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council. She lives and works in Toronto. This is Caitlyn’s second exhibition with Dianna Witte Gallery.
