Althea Murphy-Price is fascinated by the everyday fashion show of our lives, where we all walk around projecting and revealing information about ourselves through the hairstyles we sport, what we wear and all the superficial details that make up our self-images.
In her brand-new exhibition, Supplemental Ornament, at the Weston Art Gallery in downtown’s Aronoff Center for the Arts, Murphy-Price presents sculptures and prints that simultaneously focus and exaggerate the relationship between our internal identities and the selected accoutrements that extend our personalities into an array of surrounding decorative objects. All the work on display has been made since she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2005. She now resides in Bloomington, Ind. Simultaneous with her show the Weston also is displaying, through Jan. 10, sculpture by Dietrich Wagner of Erie, Pa., and Pixel paintings by Cincinnati’s Jimi Jones.
Most of Murphy-Price’s exhibition is made from synthetic hair. Even the delicate framed lithographs that accompany the sculptures repeat a texture of hair clippings that Murphy-Price uses in installations. “All That Remains: Rug Series” features, for instance, blonde, brown, auburn and other dark hair clippings that seem to have been stenciled into the patterns of an elaborately ornamental rug on a low dais.
Over the past several years, the artist has pushed her use of synthetic hair to the very brink of its possibilities: braiding it, clipping it into a fine powder and innovatively fusing it into sheets and ribbons that can be cut into shapes or folded into bows.
Read a full review of the exhibit here.
This article appears in Nov 26 – Dec 2, 2008.
