Julie Murray
2021Drawing on her background in the Fine Arts, filmmaker Julie Murray makes short experimental works in digital and film media which are poetical in nature, engaging the textural imprints and limits of the form as an essential element of pictorial content.
Her film and digital works have been exhibited at numerous national and international venues including the New York Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the London Film Festival and the Flaherty Film Seminar.
Her work was featured in the 2004 edition of the Whitney Biennial and her films are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her films are also contained in a number of University library collections in the US and are archived at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive in Los Angeles. Murray has presented her work at venues including REDCAT (Los Angeles), Anthology Film Archives (NY), Media City Film Festival (ON), Pacific Film Archives (CA), Los Angeles Filmforum, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto and at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin.
Murray’s early super-8 films were selected for a National Film Preservation Foundation Award in 2014. She taught film production at University of Iowa in 2015-7 and will be a visiting artist at CalArts in Spring of 2019.
Untitled (Light)
Julie Murray
"The film’s haunting images are accompanied by the continuous sound of a helicopter circling overhead, which at the close gives way to the distant sound of police sirens. The beams of light, which seem to emanate from above, could be confused with helicopter searchlights, a reading whose symbolic significance evokes both security and baleful scrutiny. These sounds, however, are not only immediately associated with the events of September 11; they have also become a ubiquitous presence in the urban sonic landscape. Murray reveals the subtle disconnect of sound and image only gradually, allowing conscious recognition to develop slowly in viewing the film." -Whitney Biennial catalog, (2004)
Untitled (Light)
A Legend of Parts
Julie Murray
A Legend of Parts presents a history of civilization in a less-than-historically-accurate manner where the actions of the prehistoric animals changing into those of sociopolitical "man" careening towards the organized chaos of ultimate annihilation become hopelessly confused and reversed; where the random energy of lightning itself is endowed with the colors of the flag.
A Legend of Parts
Micromoth
Julie Murray
A camera attached to a microscope facilitates the trawling of spaces shaped by small dead things in tiny chambers between the naked eye and the mansions of molecules. Infinitely devisable focal planes denote the topography and tilt of an insect limb, large and tortuous as a conifer, or a torso brown as maple syrup, which repeatedly emerge and dissolve through the lens as if composed of vapor.
Micromoth
If You Stand with Your Back to the Slowing of the Speed of Light in Water
Julie Murray
Images from an aerial tram leaving Manhattan are followed by images of a nearly static bird, of bugs fighting, and of light bending as it passes through glass. Near the film's end the tram lands in Manhattan, as if it had reversed direction; as in all of Murray's films, the images and the editing can pull several ways at once. There are no absolutes, and even the light by which we see is altered by the material it passes through. – Fred Camper
If You Stand with Your Back to the Slowing of the Speed of Light in Water
Deliquium
Julie Murray
Hidden among the pounding of animal hides, All tamped into maps, their shapes Explicit replicate butterfly wings, lie the motives of Lír. The king who paid improper attention to his children. From that first fascination And it’s lascivious gaze, Came the gorged desire for substance, Among the skins, Nets, shadows and milk bottles Pried from the stomachs of metal fish, Steam, smoke and things that won’t stay, Speared, dangled, measured, divined. All dreamed through wallpaper, Or dowsed from something they drowned in long ago. Snowed in on either side, The swans, Lír’s beloved children, Begin their 800 year journey. From lake to sea A thousand more. – JM
Deliquium
Orchard
Julie Murray
Much of the footage that comprises Orchard is of a 19c ruins that included a walled orchard in and area known as Rostellen in southwest Ireland. It is set deep in the woods and the crumbling brick and mortar of the broken walls has become the anchor for the roots of slender trees, so uninhibited for all this time that they reach twenty feet in height and have thick roots that follow like slow lazy trickles of water and in other places branch and wind over the brickwork in an arterial arrangement reminiscent of the human body. Some footage of Central Park is in there, as well as Niagara Falls, the main Dublin-to-Cork road and a thin smoking woods on the outskirts of Rosslare, Co. Waterford These are facts may be incidental to the film’s eventual form, which winds the images into an arrangement of continuous wandering. All this is attended by environmental whispering sounds until a voice calls out toward the end, in dream-bound recognition, to a figure from the far, far past.
Orchard
Obscura Camera
Julie Murray
A cardboard box with a pinhole in one end and a sheet of vellum on the backside, so that the sun fluttering among the trees is projected onto it. This moving image edit is derived from about 4 or 5 takes on the day venus was to cross the sun's path. As it turned out I got the day wrong, but it wouldn't have mattered as the image that formed on the vellum was so soft and wispish and the trees were in the way that there was no chance whatsoever venus could be seen passing by.
Obscura Camera
Elements
Julie Murray
Julie Murray
This atmospheric landscape is largely un-peopled but nevertheless expresses the busy presence of ghosts that reside in the snowy fog-bound woods, the movement of the moon and in the hesitancy of the clouds. It is an exploration of location/place both macro and micro, visited by a few incidental shadowy figures related to one another through the rhythm of their gestures.
Elements
