With approximately 900 fine-tipped Sharpie pens, Ethan Murrow blends storytelling with history, community and labor on the white walls of the Currier Museum in Manchester, New Hampshire. In his new exhibition, “Hauling,” globular collages of hundreds of tools including a saw, wooden wheel, speedometer, nail, net and modern high-tech machinery, tower over visitors. Alongside them, drawn people hold ropes and play a kind of tug-of-war with the mechanic entities, while some carry the weight of them in their hands or on their shoulders. The diagonal tugging of ropes creates movement across the walls, where visitors stand in the center of a laborious scene. The exhibit draws upon the industrial history of Manchester, which during the mid-19th century, held the largest cotton mill worldwide. Today, old mill buildings house restaurants, shops and art galleries. Murrow combines the tools that … [Read more...] about WEIGHT OF THE WALLS: ETHAN MURROW’S “HAULING” AT THE CURRIER
Ethan Murrow
Ethan Murrow at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
By John Paul Stapleton Boston, MA – Being a coastal city, the idea of changing sea levels is a real worry for Boston and many of its harbor side buildings. Ethan Murrow vamped on this as a topic of conversation to accompany his piece for the Art Wall at the Institute of Contemporary Art. “I wanted to root the drawing in the location of the museum,” Murrow said in a recent phone interview. “The museum is hanging over the Ocean. I knew I wanted to do something aquatic and architectural.” This inspired Murrow to create another one of his photorealistic wall installations, in which the image is cropped to a circle. In the case of this image, the circle makes the framing of the image resemble that of a seaside window, appropriately giving distance to the scene. The observer gets the sense that they have nothing to do but question as the focus of the image, Saint … [Read more...] about Ethan Murrow at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston