I can see the men hidden in the forest

ABSTRACT

‘I can see the men hidden in the forest’ is a speculative interpretation of the photographic images in Sadie Murdoch’s artist’s pages for the Journal of Visual Arts Practice. In her writing, the artist generates associative and affective connections between the material and performative aspects of the production of one particular art work and its gendered historical reference points. The text begins with a description of Murdoch’s ‘Je Peux Voir les Hommes Cachés dans la Forêt’ (2016), a seventeen panel photomontage, derived from a composite image published in ‘La Révolution Surrealist’ in 1929. Various stages of the construction and execution of Murdoch’s photomontage are recorded in the seven photographic images. As the text unfolds, a dreamlike narrative shifts the explicit references to other artists and artworks into and out of moments of intimate fantasy, proposing a correlation between the form of the anagram and the photographic negative.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual art
• art history
• photography
• surrealism
• dreams
• anagrams

Notes on contributor

Sadie Murdoch Employing methods of re-staging and interpretation, Sadie Murdoch explores the nature of the photographic ‘document’ as a construct. She studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1989–1992), the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York (2003–2004), and was an Abbey Rome Scholar at the British School at Rome in 2002. Her solo exhibition in 2016, SSS-MM, at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zürich, was accompanied by her artist book Omnipulsepunslide, published by Artphilein Editions. Murdoch has staged other one-person exhibitions at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, the Agency Gallery, Henry Peacock Gallery and Domobaal, London. Murdoch will present a survey show of newly commissioned and recent work in a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Roberto Polo Gallery in 2018. She was included in La Grande Horizontale at TEFAF Curated, Maastricht, Brexit - Out of the Matrix, Kunsthalle Palazzo Liestal, Basel (2017), Spectral Metropole at the Vžigalica Gallery, City Museum of Ljubljana (2012), Gets Under the Skin at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York (2010) and Ballet Mécanique at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2008). She is currently 0.5 lecture MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, University of London. She lives and works in London.

ORCID

Sadie Murdoch http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6093-4882