Dust Mining
Yesterday I was reading through some tweets, and Amy Crehore had posted some links to the work of Richard Selesnick and Nicholas Kahn (also here.)
This stuff immediately made me think of the work of my friend Ethan Murrow. Ethan was another Studio Art major in my class at Carleton, and it was always amazing to see what was going on in his corner of the studio. The first time I met him, he was carrying this huge canvas back into the building, and it was this gorgeous, raw landscape painting with straw and detritus clinging to the still-wet oil paint. He had an attachment to land and how humans interact with it, and this theme carried through his graduate work at UNC. I had never seen such work from my contemporaries, and I still think he is one of the best artists, formally and conceptually, that I know personally.
Ethan Murrow, “Off of Gaspé, ready to dive for the elusive whale”, graphite on paper 60″ x 96″, 2007.
Since that day, Ethan’s work has evolved and changed and developed into these huge graphite drawings on paper. They still hold onto that landscape aesthetic, at least formally offering humans interacting with the land. But now they also involve these brilliant convoluted stories of tragic experimenters, people whose only goal is to succeed, and who most often do anything but.
Installation view of “The Freshwater Narwhal Hoax” at Winston Wachter, Seattle, WA spring 2007
I won’t try to retell it because Ethan really does a much better job himself. He was recently interviewed for the Huffington Post regarding his current show called “Dust Mining” at Obsolete in Venice, California. I still haven’t gotten to see Ethan’s more recent work in-person, so if you are in LA, make sure you go see it for me and report back!
P.S. He doesn’t talk about it much, but Ethan is the grandson of renowned reporter Edward R. Murrow. I think I didn’t know that until several years after I met him. Ethan’s personal and artistic integrity is truly a tribute to his grandfather’s legacy.
