Manica Deprica
New York, NY 2021
Los Angeles, CA 2022
Curator: Indira Cesarine
Spring/Break HEARSAY:HERESY
Installation View
Show Description: Are the fantasies we tell ourselves today as frivolous as the princess bedtime stories many of us were raised on? The Paintings placed in the land of Manica Deprica answer this by depicting dreamy and demented bedtime rituals with a medieval edge, menaced by tiny men and their demons.
Show Description, continued:
Just as early Christians used Pagan symbols to build a practice of worship, Murphy weaves Catholic—specifically Marian—imagery into her work, stripping parts of it back to it’s most magical, witchy, feminist roots. She is fascinated with religious art, and mines it for traces of traumatic experience illustrated by metaphor.
Such a collision of ideas parallels Lionel Murphy’s own unlearning and retelling as she grew up and left her rural brand of midwestern conservative Catholicism. In a rural place without museums, churches held the greatest access to painting and sculpture. Returning to the midwest after an arts education and living in various cities, it has been healing to layer violent, erotic, queer, feminist, and political subjects upon catholic symbols.
Installation View