LIFT by KATE MURPHY AT BREENSPACE

By Benjamen Judd

Breenspace curates some of the most innovative artists that we have been luckily enough to see. Never one to shy away from non-traditional or challenging modes of art, the team at Breenspace always provide collections that are both thought provoking and expanding in their ideas and their latest show, Lift by Kate Murphy is not going to disappoint.

Lift (2013) is a single channel video installation that questions notions of the ageing body. In a culture with its face ever turned to newness and youth, Murphy eloquently explores its antithesis.

“A dancer’s body, lithe, sinewy and now seemingly inert sits in a patient lifter. The machine, with an unforgettable whirr activates its robotic arm, slowly lifting her into the air. She navigates a slow, awkward turn, idly singing into the black abyss of the frame. During three ‘takes’ we see the action repeated, a device that draws on both the rehearsal, and a sense of déjà vu that haunts life’s repeated routines. Her movements, restricted by the harness, recall the elegance of a balletic past, a muscle memory that burns through her entrapment.”

Lift continues Murphy’s fascination with the ‘inadvertent’ or ‘accidental’ performer. This highly charged work has emerged from Murphy’s extended time in a nursing home, a space in which her father now resides, observing people with dementia enduring the slow erosion of their minds and bodies.

The work looks at the indelible imprint of a lifetime of physical and emotional actions that represent a person, be that in movement or song. Lift focuses on the relationship between the cognitive and the subconscious self, and the ‘dances’ we perform everyday.

Lift by Kate Murphy opens at Breenspace on November 29 and will run until 21 December.

Breenspace is located at Level 3, 17-19 Alberta Street Sydney.

*image used is from a previous exhibition, The Note.