Spotlight Artist

Ben Murray

Midwest
Artist profile photo
Featured in New American Paintings

Artist Statement

In this most recent body of work, experimental film has become a major influence on how I approach duration in my subjects. While I paint, films are played on a continual loop in my studio, allowing me to operate between painting’s long history of image-making and the immediate vanishing of images in film.

These paintings are a deconstructive reflection of where I am physically, and the titles are symbolic of my surroundings. We recently moved from Chicago to the dunes of Gary, Indiana and I have become immersed in the landscape here. I grew up a few miles away, recording music in my dad’s garage, and am now making work focused on duration with a lot of the same impulses. This area has been a checkpoint for me in a lot of different roles at different times over the years, but the ground is relatively unchanged. There is a movement to that figure–ground relationship that I want to make visceral. Depicting fragments of intermittent images and memories stitched together, sustained all at once in past-present-future tense.

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