Julie Murray
Historia
Julie Murray is an Irish born artist, film and video maker living in the US.
Drawing on her background in the Fine Arts, filmmaker Julie Murray makes short experimental works in digital and film media which are poetical in nature, engaging the textural imprints and limits of the form as an essential element of pictorial content.
Her film and digital works have been exhibited at numerous national and international venues including the New York Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the London Film Festival and the Flaherty Film Seminar.
Her work was featured in the 2004 edition of the Whitney Biennial and her films are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her films are also contained in a number of University library collections in the US and are archived at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive in Los Angeles. Murray has presented her work at venues including REDCAT (Los Angeles), Anthology Film Archives (NY), Media City Film Festival (ON), Pacific Film Archives (CA), Los Angeles Filmforum, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto and at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin.
Murray’s early super-8 films were selected for a National Film Preservation Foundation Award in 2014. She taught film production at University of Iowa in 2015-7 and will be a visiting artist at CalArts in Spring of 2019.
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Scenes from a found roll of martial arts movie footage is unspooled past a video camera on a light table, stopping and starting to pick out parts of the narrative. The archly formal play of fights, betrayal, dishonour and ruined friendships is accompanied by ambient sounds of a city going about its routine business outside.
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Scenes from a found roll of martial arts movie footage is unspooled past a video camera on a light table, stopping and starting to pick out parts of the narrative. The archly formal play of fights, betrayal, dishonour and ruined friendships is accompanied by ambient sounds of a city going about its routine business outside.
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MUSICAL TENSIONS IN THE RESONANT BODIES OF WIND TURBINES
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A low light montage using Black Magic Ursa on a bean bag pod.
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The stanza in poetry is analogous with the paragraph that is seen in prose; related thoughts are grouped into units. In music, groups of lines are typically referred to as verses. The stanza has also been known by terms such as batch, fit, and stave. This film is composed of related images grouped into a unit.
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Various reels of found 35mm movie film are pulled over a light box under the fixed gaze of video capture. Through veils of apparent motion, the movements of characters can be discerned and their motivations artfully speculated upon. An oblique tribute to Pere Portabella's Vampir-Cuadecuc, narrative and plot in UNTITLED (TIME) are progressively subsumed in a switching and swaying abstraction to percussion rhythms crashed out on cymbals.
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A brief account of visual moments recorded at Kalona Horse Sales Barn auction, IA. The animals are numbered as in some cases are their days.
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Calculating the angle of awe at a gas station in rural Midwest.
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A composition of scenes and sounds in a montage reflecting poetic and musical forms. The camera, a toy, records only in black with a crude plastic lens which softens and distorts pictorial detail, creating ample room for the mind's eye to roam and query, or not, the nature of image, meaning and attachment.
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Frequency Objects, a photogram, creates a rhythmic friction between a chaotic animation of old family photographic negatives and the smooth motion of found movie images. Through imprecise stops and starts image fragments appear. The glacial motion of figures falling half in and half out of the frame and faces suddenly happened upon amid the abstract patterns of fabric and opaque objects producing faithful shadows of themselves.
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A body of water, the body of the sky and figures on ground, shored against one another in rhythms of waves abrading a field framed for a new anxiety. - Julie Murray
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A duet of found film material and video. The 35mm movie film image is unraveled without a shutter and filtered through video capture electronics. Still recognizable, although hazy and drifting in soft pink abstracts, figures in character emerge and fade, passing through the American desert landscape like phantoms.
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IN AN EYE/EAR DUET, MOVEMENTS AND CUTS IN THE IMAGE ARE IN CONTRAPUNTAL MOMENTUM, FIRST WITH SATIE’S DANCE DE TRAVERS AND THEN WITH TWITTERING BIRDS AND BEES IN A FIELD.
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Microfilm model airplanes and their people.
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Things coaxed into light in roughly the order they were encountered.
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Convolves the aberrations found within two image-making technologies; film and video, which here combine to produce a heap of dichotomies and forensic textures of process, like human imprints in sand.
Película perteneciente a la serie Light Licks filmada durante la celebración del festival Media City en Windsor.
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Cyan is assembled from numerous 16mm film workshops. Some of the footage is found, most is made, much of it filmed by participants themselves. Accumulated between 2004 and 2014.
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A cardboard box with a pinhole in one end and a sheet of vellum on the backside, so that the sun fluttering among the trees is projected onto it. This moving image edit is derived from about 4 or 5 takes on the day venus was to cross the sun's path. As it turned out I got the day wrong, but it wouldn't have mattered as the image that formed on the vellum was so soft and wispish and the trees were in the way that there was no chance whatsoever venus could be seen passing by.
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Time spent at two shores, one thinly populated, the other a wasteland, joined by the interluency of various paths taken, each bit real enough, though exact measures being obscurely indicated. Notions of home and its ache are, to borrow a phrase, “not capable of being told unless by far-off hints and adumbrations”.
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A liebestod from the secret life of slugs.
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This atmospheric landscape is largely un-peopled but nevertheless expresses the busy presence of ghosts that reside in the snowy fog-bound woods, the movement of the moon and in the hesitancy of the clouds. It is an exploration of location/place both macro and micro, visited by a few incidental shadowy figures related to one another through the rhythm of their gestures.
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This atmospheric landscape is largely un-peopled but nevertheless expresses the busy presence of ghosts that reside in the snowy fog-bound woods, the movement of the moon and in the hesitancy of the clouds. It is an exploration of location/place both macro and micro, visited by a few incidental shadowy figures related to one another through the rhythm of their gestures.
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The enormous carcass of the Michigan Theatre, a ruin among ruins, now serves as an inner-city car park and home for ghosts.
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Much of the footage that comprises Orchard is of a 19c ruins that included a walled orchard in and area known as Rostellen in southwest Ireland. It is set deep in the woods and the crumbling brick and mortar of the broken walls has become the anchor for the roots of slender trees, so uninhibited for all this time that they reach twenty feet in height and have thick roots that follow like slow lazy trickles of water and in other places branch and wind over the brickwork in an arterial arrangement reminiscent of the human body.
Some footage of Central Park is in there, as well as Niagara Falls, the main Dublin-to-Cork road and a thin smoking woods on the outskirts of Rosslare, Co. Waterford These are facts may be incidental to the film’s eventual form, which winds the images into an arrangement of continuous wandering. All this is attended by environmental whispering sounds until a voice calls out toward the end, in dream-bound recognition, to a figure from the far, far past.
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Hidden among the pounding of animal hides,
All tamped into maps, their shapes
Explicit replicate butterfly wings, lie the motives of Lír.
The king who paid improper attention to his children. From that first fascination
And it’s lascivious gaze,
Came the gorged desire for substance,
Among the skins,
Nets, shadows and milk bottles
Pried from the stomachs of metal fish,
Steam, smoke and things that won’t stay,
Speared, dangled, measured, divined.
All dreamed through wallpaper,
Or dowsed from something they drowned in long ago. Snowed in on either side,
The swans,
Lír’s beloved children,
Begin their 800 year journey.
From lake to sea
A thousand more. – JM
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The most striking thing about observing Niagara Falls is that they don’t seem to be falling at all. Being so vast they give the impression of doing just the opposite. This idea comes to mind and the body to feel elevated and rotated with its force. Like as ‘look’ is to ‘leap’, naming this portrait of Niagara’s water-ous site, “Fl.oz” is descriptive by way of a metaphoric matrix of bubbly spit volleyed from the tip of the tongue to contribute to all the world’s great oceans in a barrel-suited outfit of onomatopoeic humor, is an attempt to allude to all that is other than looking that has to do with apprehension.
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A dark meditation on father-son relations.
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"The film’s haunting images are accompanied by the continuous sound of a helicopter circling overhead, which at the close gives way to the distant sound of police sirens. The beams of light, which seem to emanate from above, could be confused with helicopter searchlights, a reading whose symbolic significance evokes both security and baleful scrutiny. These sounds, however, are not only immediately associated with the events of September 11; they have also become a ubiquitous presence in the urban sonic landscape. Murray reveals the subtle disconnect of sound and image only gradually, allowing conscious recognition to develop slowly in viewing the film." -Whitney Biennial catalog, (2004)
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Otherrehto is a short digital video construct of re-agitated film frames of a roiling rorschach set to the rhythm of the rolling text of a small excerpt from S.T. Coleridge's “night-conversations” in which he speculates upon the “force of suppressed Instincts stirring in the heart & bodily frame” of St. Theresa of Avila. All unfurling to voices risen in praise and the tuneful glissando of a record grinding to halt.
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A camera attached to a microscope facilitates the trawling of spaces shaped by small dead things in tiny chambers between the naked eye and the mansions of molecules. Infinitely devisable focal planes denote the topography and tilt of an insect limb, large and tortuous as a conifer, or a torso brown as maple syrup, which repeatedly emerge and dissolve through the lens as if composed of vapor.
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Children's 3-D toys and insects are the subjects of Julie Murray's look at the violence inherent in the very notion of motion. Music: "Three Landscapes for Peter Wyer"
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Images from an aerial tram leaving Manhattan are followed by images of a nearly static bird, of bugs fighting, and of light bending as it passes through glass. Near the film's end the tram lands in Manhattan, as if it had reversed direction; as in all of Murray's films, the images and the editing can pull several ways at once. There are no absolutes, and even the light by which we see is altered by the material it passes through. – Fred Camper
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A 16 mm. experimental film.
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In this montage a melding of camera original and found material hints at a realization which is evident only in the fissures of splintered associations. Obscured among visceral absurdities and lightweight witticisms there seeps a viscera, an acrid recollection, coiled in the intangibles of puzzled shadows.
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A Legend of Parts presents a history of civilization in a less-than-historically-accurate manner where the actions of the prehistoric animals changing into those of sociopolitical "man" careening towards the organized chaos of ultimate annihilation become hopelessly confused and reversed; where the random energy of lightning itself is endowed with the colors of the flag.
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Tr'Cheot'My P'y is a hiccuping audio news segment to which footage from many sources is loosely choreographed. The film is intended as a portrait of the body and embodiment, systems of information and representations of the body itself.
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FF is around three years' worth of collected footage culled from all sources in a variety of formats, from dumpsters to video. It is put together in such a way as to provide miniature, almost instantaneous fictions, confined and numerous, where meaning can occur between the frames as much as it might in the frame. Overall, the film could be described as a visual assault as well as a reference to the invasive nature of the act of taking photographs and more abstractedly with the problem of image or picture functioning as representation of some or all aspects of an object or thing. While the movements and the pace of the film are structured as to suggest relentlessness and insistence of control, the assembly of images therein serve to illustrate the nervous breakdown of the characters represented as their actions, forced into exact repetitions, lose their original expression and take on a new, more ominous existence.
