Canada Pavilion Coquitlam – James Linton Murphy

Press Release
The Maillardville Cultural Appreciation Society is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent work by James Linton Murphy. Often manifesting as digital and media projects, Murphy’s practice focuses on specific seminal figures or elements in the art world as subjects whose meaning may be mined and reconstituted. His works reframe pieces of the past giving them a new context and providing them with a renewed legibility in the present. Using Rodney Graham’s Venice Biennale exhibition as his principle point of reference, Murphy has re-imagined the Canadian pavilion for the MCAS gallery, including a functioning video game version Vexation Island. With humour and perspicacity a new set of concerns is defined in this iteration of a key Canadian artwork.

Play again?
When we laugh we usually don’t think of why. Our laughter feels like a subconscious process, it is strong enough to make us react but the full reason for that reaction can be hard to explain. In worlds like art it seems laughter should be kept at a distance, as though it is somehow disrespectful or cynical, as though if we truly care about something we could never laugh in its vicinity. This makes it hard for humour to live in a place like a gallery, a place so long branded as the deathbed of art. We rightly assume that a mausoleum is a tough crowd when you’re trying to be funny.

To take something not yet dead, but perhaps conventional, with wide acknowledgement and try to change it, to make it our own, to give it a new legibility in the present, seems by its refusal of unwarranted stoicism, to achieve comedy in the least likely of places. Detractors will make accusations of disrespect or narcissism. However the things that remain funny past the initial chuckle do so because they provide a better understanding of the world, a new way to think of it that gives meaning beyond a closed off interpretation. A good joke we can understand is more useful than a work of art we cannot, however there’s always someone who won’t get it.