December 3, 2016
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Todd Murphy Review on Hyperallergic
Seph Rooney wrote a wonderful review of the Todd Murphy show on Hyperallergic:
The artist Todd Murphy uses skirts as just such a means of projection, making them gateways to mythical realms. For Murphy’s solo exhibition at Marc Straus gallery, he has placed dresses inside black shadow boxes, and within their skirts he’s created otherworldly landscapes. The boxes are lit from the inside, so one can see in each skirt’s carved outline a forest of trees denuded by winter, concocted from branches wrapped in copper wire; or a similar woodland at night, pocked with stars and suffused with indigo light; or a sailboat with white sails spilling out. These pieces work because they play on the notion of the feminine mystique (which is made up of a buffet of patriarchal ideology, self-help discourse, and essentialist ideas of what constitutes womanly power). They imagine the territory under the skirt as a place where other realities come into being.
