CURATED: MARGARET MURPHY

Margaret Murphy is a visual artist based in Los Angeles, California. Her work focuses on topics like femininity, sexuality, and identity in a post-social media culture. Murphy’s art uses bright colors, lighting, props, and aesthetic accents to create visceral responses within the viewer. Be it a negative or positive reaction to her work, Murphy hopes her art prompts dialogues around gender, the male gaze, and beauty standards. Photography is Murphy’s main artistic medium; however, she also creates image and text collages and digital art made with artificial intelligence tools.

Murphy earned her MFA from the University of Hartford’s Limited Photography Residency in 2021. 

Her work has been shown in exhibitions in the United States, such as in Los Angeles, New York City, and the Washington, DC, area.

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ARTIST

MAGAZINE

EXHIBITION

View the collection on <a href="https://opensea.io/collection/future-pasts-past-futures" data-mce-href="https://opensea.io/collection/future-pasts-past-futures" data-mce-fragment="1">OpenSe</a><a href="https://opensea.io/collection/future-pasts-past-futures" data-mce-href="https://opensea.io/collection/future-pasts-past-futures" data-mce-fragment="1">a</a> ABOUT THE WORK The absurdity of AI-generated art is reminiscent of adolescence. As a teenager, nothing makes sense, everything feels exaggerated and extreme. Expectations about how things will turn out<meta charset="utf-8">—sometimes met, sometimes not. These expectations are heightened, thanks to hormone changes and a lack of life's lessons to draw from. Expectations are depicted using AI text-to-image tools. Language has meaning and value, and it carries implications that are understood differently by each individual. The absurdity of AI text-to-image outputs is used as a metaphor for making sense of our pasts as teens in Margaret Murphy's FUTURE PASTS, PAST FUTURES, while simultaneously hypothesizing adolescence in the future. Murphy explores popular adolescent cultural traditions like prom, summers at county fairs, joyrides, house parties, summers pool-side, family vacations, and skate parks with a reverent nostalgia that, in connection with AI, feels almost like last night's dream. As time passes and memories fade, technology both helps us recall and forget our pasts more swiftly. Murphy's series attempts to comprehend the perspectives of adolescent absurdities through AI wonders about teenagers of the future.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
FUTURE PASTS, PAST FUTURES is part of the exhibition RECOLLECTION. AI AND MEMORY presented by EXPANDED.ART in collaboration with The NFT Gallery at their galleries in New York and London, 11 April – 13 May 2023. 19 artists explore the idea of further challenging the concreteness of human memory—personal or collective—through creative collaboration with AI.  <meta charset="utf-8">Memories are nebulous. Scientific studies and phenomena such as "The Mandela Effect" have shown that humans rarely recall things in their unbiased exactitude. Artificial Intelligence already assists human memory in the form of predictive text and GPS navigation. One would surmise that there exists a role for AI when it comes to supplementing even more complex memory. Artists: Crashblossom, Ilya Bliznets, Anna Dart, Olga Fedorova, Ross Goodwin, Danielle King, Margaret Murphy, Kika Nicolela, Roope Rainisto, Daria Rastunina, Manuel Rossner, Travis LeRoy Southworth, Anne Spalter, Nathaniel Stern, Sasha Stiles, Stephan Vasement, Nicola Villa, Sabato Visconti, and Erika Weitz. <meta charset="utf-8">ABOUT THE NFT <meta charset="utf-8">Contract address: <meta charset="utf-8"> <a href="https://etherscan.io/address/0xca171ec002ca5999176d8d7330ba38208ba35e6b" data-mce-href="https://etherscan.io/address/0xca171ec002ca5999176d8d7330ba38208ba35e6b" data-mce-fragment="1">0xca171ec002ca5999176d8d7330ba38208ba35e6b</a> <meta charset="utf-8">Token Standard: ERC-721 Blockchain: Ethereum Metadata: Frozen and decentralized <a href="https://opensea.io/collection/future-pasts-past-futures" data-mce-href="https://opensea.io/collection/future-pasts-past-futures" data-mce-fragment="1"> </a>

Title

FUTURE PASTS, PAST FUTURES

BLOODY BLOOD ORANGES is a photograph from Margaret Murphy’s series “I Could Look at You All Day, made in 2020. The project consists of self-portraits and still lives made in Murphy’s home. The pictures visualize her interest in self-perception, consider the male gaze and play amongst social media’s influence on contemporary photography.
John Berger writes in WAYS OF SEEING, that a woman must simultaneously be both "the surveyor" and “the surveyed” because how she appears to those outside herself is critical to her success in life. Murphy’s photographs ask how this concept—and internalized misogyny—shapes the way we understand ourselves in the world. The companionship of still lives and portraiture in the project invites the viewer to survey moments of intimacy, reflection, disgust, celebration, and ambivalence within the world of Murphy's creation: a woman in flux between the standards set before her and the standards that she inherently feels exist within her. 
ABOUT THE EDITION NUMBER
The editions are numbered randomly, i.e. the edition number is not chronologically assigned to the time of order receipt. All LIMITED EDITIONS are authenticated with a Certificate of Authenticity Sticker signed and numbered by the artist.

Bloody Blood Oranges

FEATURED ARTWORKS

Visual artist Margaret Murphy discusses the fascination and challenges of self-portraiture, her photographic journey, and net feminism.

SELF PORTRAITS AND FEMINISM 

MARGARET MURPHY: PHOTOGRAPHY IN A POST-SOCIAL MEDIA ERA

EXPANDED.ART is pleased to present the group exhibition RECOLLECTION. AI AND MEMORY in collaboration with The NFT Gallery in London and New York. 

In the exhibition, 19 artists explore the idea of further challenging the concreteness of human memory—personal or collective—through creative collaboration with AI.
