Ithaca College

Exhibiting artist Michelle Marie Murphy will speak about her work on view at the Handwerker Gallery in the three-artist exhibition, BRIGHT SPECK, on Wednesday, March 22, 2017, at 6 p.m.. 

Artist Biography:

Michelle Marie Murphy (b. 1981, Cleveland, Ohio) is an artist based in Chicago. Murphy is anticipating an MFA in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2017), and received her BFA at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2004. Her work has been published and exhibited Internationally, including exhibitions in NYC, Paris, Geneva Switzerland, Guatemala City, Chicago, and San Francisco. Her work is featured in ARTfile magazine (NYC) DISCOVER Magazine, Buzzfeed, Art & Science Journal, Newsweek and the Daily Beast, 20×200, Popular Photography magazine, and the Drawing Center Viewing Program. Murphy was a Professional Photographer at the NASA Glenn Research Center (for 11 years), Director/Founder of Micro Art Space (an artist residency program & exhibition space), and currently curates the art + culture online magazine MAKE8ELIEVE with Swiss artist/designer Cetusss.

Murphy’s work has been recently acquired in the Cleveland Clinic Collection, the corporate Progressive Art Collection, and private collections in the cities of: NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, Geneva Switzerland, Guatemala City, Cleveland.

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On View at the Handwerker:

Bright Speck: Desirée Holman, Anna Huff, Michelle Marie Murphy

Curated by Mara Baldwin

March 22–April 21, 2017

In 1972 the astronauts aboard the Apollo 17 likened the experience of looking back at the earth to seeing a blue marble hanging in the void.  The power of this vision is the awe-inspiring realization of both the complex fragility of our planet and our alienation from and connectedness to a vast, expanding universe. The artists in Bright Speck conflate the origins of life, knowledge, and the cosmos, each with uniquely textured responses. Michelle Murphy’s photographs and performances overlay the corporeal processes of pregnancy and birth with astronomical theory, drawing from her career as a photographer working for NASA and personal convictions for social reform. Desirée Holman’s long-term projects and culminating films present fantastical worlds of hybridity, where character play investigates and proposes social solutions our own world. Her culminating films, Reborn (2009), Heterotopias (2011), and Sophont (2015), present a narrative arc that builds towards an aesthetic iconography of harmonic convergence, and cosmic unity. Anna Huff’s work traces the intersections of the body, objects, and rituals by setting up improvised performances that encourage permeation of liminal space. Her primordial toddler-designed costumes and props included in Bright Speck will be activated by a performance featuring Ithaca College students on the evening of her artist talk on April 4. Utilizing critical optimism and creative inquiry, Murphy, Holman, and Huff travel between our world and the stars, catalyzing new possibilities of seeing, thinking, and wondering.

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All exhibitions and events at the Handwerker Gallery are free and open to the public.  The Handwerker Gallery is open Monday, Wednesday, & Friday from 10am-6pm; Thursdays from 10am-9pm; and Saturday & Sunday from 12pm-5pm. Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Mara Baldwin at mbaldwin@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-3548. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.

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