SURREALISM NOW! is proud to presents JO OWENS MURRAY! A Truly Fascinating Surrealist Artist of the 21st Century!!!
JO OWENS MURRAY
Graziella Marchicelli, Ph.D.
Fine Arts Curator, Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art
The Surrealist inclination to aestheticize found objects and often
juxtapose incongruent ones led to the experimentation of
department store mannequins as art objects, a natural choice
considering the mannequin's malleability. In the 1938 Exposition
Internationale du Surréalisme, organized by Paul Eluard, Andre
Breton and Marcel Duchamp at the Galerie Beaux-Arts, the
Surrealists presented department store mannequins as apparitions
d'etres-objets (phantom object-beings).1 André Masson's female
mannequin attracted the most attention. Her head is imprisoned in
a bird cage, her mouth masked, with a pansy directly over the
opening... She cannot speak; she is entrapped even as she is
decorated, wearing at once too much and too little, dressed up and
dressed down, naked and rendered mute, added to and subtracted
from, but most of all entrapped. The female mannequin was the
Surrealists' readymade plaything, tamed, silent and submissive.
The female mannequin has also fascinated Jo Owens Murray. A self-
taught artist, Murray received a Bachelor of Arts in art history from Rosemont College, Pennsylvania in 1993, and managed Rosemont
College's Womens Center until she decided to become a full time
artist. Born in Durham, North Carolina, Murray left home at age
nineteen, eventually settling in Pennsylvania where her family
roots lie.
Although Murray started her career as a photographer, she was
drawn to assemblage sculpture by way of experiments with various
materials and fabrics. Murray's assemblage sculptures, which she
calls, the girls, are unique and exceptional examples of
contemporary Surrealism, and her application of beads and jewels
adhered to mannequins is a pioneering technique. Her sculptures
are heavily encrusted with large, brightly colored beads, buttons,
mirrors, costume jewelry, plastic flowers, feathers, bridal veils
and birdcages.
Murray defies the current art world's tendency to pad each work
with profuse rhetoric or lengthy statements. Although she states
that her work is about specific concerns regarding women, she
makes a point of stepping back and allowing room for viewer
interpretation. Murray's beaded sculptures prompt questions about
beauty, femininity, identity, loss, grief and redemption. Her sculptures explore myths about women. Journalist Burton Wasserman
wrote that Murray's work has "deeply rooted layers of personal
memory, thought and feeling, joined with reflections on the
various roles played by women in society, past and present." About
herself, Murray says, "My sculptures reflect my own upbringing as
a young girl, my fantasies combined with the realities of today."
Murray's beaded sculptures have many personae. They are warriors,
princesses, mothers, brides and circus performers. "My work tells of the myth of how women should be seen and not heard. They should
reflect only their external beauty. As women we have become more
concerned with our outer appearance. That is why my girls are
nothing more than empty, hollow shells; all they have is their
outer beauty. Like the Surrealists, I have transformed women into
fixtures. They are only parts and never whole."
Bird in a Gilded Cage (1999) and Gateway to Your Soul (1998)
depict female heads covered with bright, colorful jewels. In Bird
in a Gilded Cage, a woman's beautiful beaded and jeweled head is
placed inside a cage decorated on one side with a garland of red
flowers. Her left eye is a flower and her right a mirror. She has
grapes wrapped around her neck and her mouth is sealed with a
butterfly. The woman is pure ostentation, literally all glitz, and
she is trapped. Murray describes the woman as "always pretty,
always thin and always quiet."
In Gateway to Your Soul, a beaded head hangs from a bird stand.
The eyes are replaced with mirrors, allowing the viewer to see his
or her own eyes. The bodiless woman suggests enchantment and
seduction, but there is, at the same time, something menacing
about her. Her collar is reminiscent of a spiderweb and the beads
around her mirror-eyes suggest a mask. Carl Jung's, "dark side of
the self", is hinted at here; it is "the most dangerous thing of
all, precisely because the self is the greatest power in the
psyche."
Murray's bejeweled assemblages of female mannequin heads,
mannequin bodies and masks suggest a host of intriguing dualities:
beauty/ugliness, virgin/harlot, predator/prey, human/automaton,
among others. Let's Play (2001), for example, brings to mind more
than one duality. Half mannequin, half horse, Let's Play is a
mannequin torso with a horse's head. The half human, half animal
figure wears a wedding dress and is adorned from head to waist
with jewels and beads. Murray's horse-mannequin stands straight
and looks ahead, oddly reminiscent of the host of mythological
characters and deities of a zoomorphic nature: Bast, the cat-headed Egyptian goddess; Ganesha, the Hindu god with an elephant's
head; the Greek sphinx, a monster with a woman's head and a lion's
body, just to name a few. Beyond the evident duality of man/animal, the juxtaposition of horse and wedding dress also suggests such dualities as power/innocence and passion/virginity.
Murray explores a variation of the old saying, "Clothes make the
man." Instead, she plays with the idea, "Clothes make the woman."
The mannequin bust, Material Girl (1997), is a self-absorbed
beauty with high cheekbones and prominent, red lips sealed with a
jewel. Similarly, Lady in Red (2001) also conveys conceit and
vanity. Murray observes, "Jewelry provides a history of women
through different style periods.We can look back to the earliest
drawings, carvings and paintings, and you will always find women
adorned with jewelry. We are always trying to enhance our
appearance by adding pretty objects to cover our bodies." Murray
is critical of women who use jewelry to hide themselves; she asks
"Have we turned ourselves into the object we wear", "Are we
stopping others from seeing us, our true selves?"
Murray leaves the observer with more questions than answers. The
assemblages are highly evocative but forever puzzling. She
approaches each work with a keen sense of intention and strategy,
but, in the true spirit of Surrealism, she avoids easy answers for
her viewers. Rather, she lets nuance, strangeness, unease and
mystery abound.
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