Kevin Murphy
Kevin Murphy’s cloud paintings attempt to navigate the space between romantic projection and int ellectual closure. Re-imagining the romantic cloudscape as an abstract colour-field, the paintings examine the vocabulary of the absolute within an appropriated and monumentalized indexical or reference document. Strategies of definition and documentation become unfixed by an all-too-earnest engagement in traditions of subjective experience and the sublime, while any transcendent qualities become grounded in scientific jargon and textbook descriptions. Parabolic stretcher frames complete a theatrical catachresis of mutually contradictory tropes, leaving the works to hover somewhere between banality and self-importance, cynicism and sincerity.
Polar stratospheric cloud (white) with other clouds colored by a sunset. This is a nacreous or mother-of-pearl type of polar stratospheric cloud (PSC). PSCs are high-altitude icy clouds that are found about 24 kilometers/15 miles up in the polar atmosphere. They form only during winter when the temperature drops below around -112ºF/-80ºC. PSCs play a key role in the destruction of ozone by chlorine. They convert harmless forms of chlorine into highly reactive forms. Chlorine is carried into the stratosphere in CFCs (chloro-fluorocarbons), gases used as refrigerants and during foam plastic manufacture. Photographed over Swedish Lapland in early January, Latex on Canvas, 104” x 84”
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