Mechanics Of Chaos: Michele Murtaugh's Solo Exhibition

A conversation between the artist and gallery director Sergio Gomez will take place the night of the reception at 8:00 pm.

What do we look like in the moment we decide to create chaos for ourselves? In this series I am exploring the things we do to kick up the sand on our very own plans and head straight into an imagined hell. I challenged to reveal the side of self that tends to dismantle and, at times, disintegrate comfort. I began this construction during the first few months of the pandemic when my daughter and I began reading The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, beginning with the Inferno.

And like many, I had an enormous amount of time to reflect on life and the words of this book and of how each level and punishment of hell was a direct correlation of how one lived. I donned my headlamp, of sorts, and went spelunking into the causes of my perceived hell and came to light a magnificent finding! What had felt like hell was only a part of myself that needed change! By creating self chaos, I was answering the call for alteration.

I discovered that some of my tendencies of self sabotage and or chaos was a covert operation of readjustment. In working through each of these paintings I was able to actualize what that side of me looks like. I chose the location of sand dunes to emphasize the duality of the perceived bleakness and the infinite vastness of possibility. I chose to paint suggestively rather than precisely to magnify movement and emotions.

https://33contemporarygallery.com/blogs/news/mechanics-of-chaos-michele-murtaughs-solo-exhibition