Currently on show, and until November 24, Shepparton Art Museum is presenting Kate Murphy: Probable Portraits, a solo exhibition of video portraits by Sydney-based artist Kate Murphy, one of Australia’s most exciting and successful young artists.
Kate Murphy: Probable Portraits is the largest display of video art ever presented at SAM. The exhibition includes a series of video portraits exploring the lives of everyday Australians, including the artist’s mother and siblings, a Greek-Australian migrant family, primary school children, and an aspiring child pop-singer living in the UK. Six video installations utilising state-of-the-art video projections, monitors, and surround sound technology fill the two downstairs, temporary exhibition spaces at SAM.
Kate Murphy’s videos use documentary filmmaking techniques and portraiture to reveal the complex and rich inner lives of her subjects. Using interviews, cinematography and elaborate sound design, Murphy explores intimate and moving aspects of her subject’s lives including their experiences of migration, grief, motherhood, religious faith, spirituality and childhood.
“Murphy accesses fragile and unseen psychological experiences of the subjects in her works. Vulnerabilities, base-fears and untapped memories are revealed, considered—and in some cases analysed using the medium of the moving image. Dear Kate…a probable portrait (2011)—the work that inspired the title of this exhibition—is a pertinent example and seems to encapsulate many of the artist’s ongoing areas of interest such as movement, performance, and the agency of voice,” SAM curator Elise Routledge writes in her catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition.
The exhibition includes the large-scale, immersive installation, Yia Yia’s song. This work features a found recording of a mother in Greece in 1976 singing a lament for the children who left her in Greece to migrate to Australia. The work combines the woman’s haunting singing with interviews of her children many years later living in Australia.
Prayers of a Mother continues the theme of family in a portrait of the artist’s mother and siblings. In this work, Murphy’s mother speaks about the daily prayers she says for her family, while silent portraits of her eight children depict them responding to their mother’s voice with laughter, bemusement, sadness and love.
The experience of childhood is further explored in Britney Love (2000), Britney Love (2007) and Assembly. Britney Love presents a portrait through time of a young girl from childhood to adulthood as she follows her dream of becoming a pop-singer. Assembly documents expressions of religious faith by Australian Catholic primary school students during their morning prayer rituals.
Cry me a future (Dublin) is the only self-portrait in the exhibition. The work shares the artist’s emotional response to a clairvoyant reading she experienced in Ireland, and provides cathartic reflection on our often absurd search for connection with the past and security in the future.
Kate Murphy: Probable Portraits shows at Shepparton Art Museum until November 24.
Images:
1) Kate Murphy, Assembly, 2009. Digital video still, single channel digital video installation
Image courtesy of the artist and BREENSPACE, Sydney © Kate Murphy 2009. Assembly (2009) was commissioned by ReelDance, Sydney, 2009.
2) Kate Murphy, Cry me a future (Dublin), 2006. Digital video still, single channel digital video installation with sound. Image courtesy of the artist and BREENSPACE, Sydney. © the artist
3) Kate Murphy, Assembly, 2009. Digital video still, single channel digital video installation
Image courtesy of the artist and BREENSPACE, Sydney © Kate Murphy 2009. Assembly (2009) was commissioned by ReelDance, Sydney, 2009.
4) Kate Murphy
5) Kate Murphy, Prayers of a Mother, 1999. Digital video still (detail). Five channel video installation, single channel sound. Image courtesy of the artist and BREENSPACE, Sydney. © the artist
