Irish-born artist Clive Murphy moved from Belfast to New York in 2005. Previous exhibitions include: The Sixth Borough, c/o No Longer Empty, Governor’s Island, New York (2010); Soul For Sale, Tate Modern, London (2010); Ghost Machine, Magnan Metz Gallery, New York (2009) Explorations of the Uncanny, Synthetic Zero Gallery, New York (2009); Almost Nothing, Soap Factory Gallery, Minneapolis (2009); LMCC Work Space Program, New York (2008); Non-Oblectif Sud, Côtes du Rhône (2008); Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2008); West Germany Gallery, Berlin (2007); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007); Fieldgate Gallery, London (2007); Mercer Union Gallery, Toronto (2006); Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (2005) Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork (2005); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Manchester/Sheffield/London (2005); Alma Enterprises Gallery, London (2005); British Council/CityMine(d) Brussels (2005); Eastlink Gallery, Shanghai (2004); Gallery 411, Hangzhou (2004); Zedebois Centre, Lisbon (2003) EV+A, Limerick (2002); CCFA, Prague (2001)

My practice draws from the peripheries of visual culture, mining diverse sources such as porn spam, found audiocassette tape, evangelical sermon titles, self-assembly instructional diagrams, folk art embroideries and fairground inflatables. I appropriate and reconfigure familiar signifiers in order to explore their wider cultural resonance, uncovering new ground for the proliferation of diverse meanings.

 My work concerns itself with both site and surface - not only the position of the individual within an increasingly ‘mass’ oriented environment but also the contours, the landscapes through which this environing is revealed. Exploring themes of hierarchy, inter-relationality and meaning formation, I infiltrate sites of visual signification with a combination of pathos and incongruity, reconstituting ideological, cultural and rhetorical systems in an effort to situate anew a sense of human space.

My methodology centers on the expansion and abstraction of the concept or genre of ‘landscape’ as it relates to environment in a cultural and semiological sense. And while the conscious embrace of low culture displays a debt to Pop Art it also points beyond this by also orienteering the terrains of post-minimalism, relational aesthetics and public intervention.

Operating in a characteristically lo-fi manner, using materials and techniques that exist quite far down on the artistic food chain, I strive for ends greater than the sums of their parts in an effort to elevate and democratize.