NYAB Event - Ethan Murrow “State Flag”

Ethan Murrow “State Flag”

Winston Wachter Fine Art

This event has ended.

Best known for his large-scale graphite drawings, Murrow is a master of detail who uses exquisite shading and line work to create multifaceted depictions of the fantastic and improbable. Playing with scale and perspective, his works often seem like optical illusions, offering viewers an unexpected inversion of the known world and exploring the boundary between reality and the imagination.

In his newest series, Murrow examines the images that define statehood across America. Jumping off from the notion that the history and identity of a state can be embodied by symbols like the ones found on the backs of our twenty-five cent coins, Murrow offers a more cynical portrayal of the various regions of this country. The drawings featured in State Flag revel in the complicated nature of the history and stereotypes that lace through each geographical subsection of the United States.

The anthropological yet playful way in which Murrow assembles and curates the diverse imagery in his drawings is similar to the curiosity cabinets popular in Renaissance Europe. The minute details found in his vast works reel viewers in, inviting them into a landscape that merges fact with fiction, and memory with fantasy.

In addition to graphite drawings, the exhibition features an elaborate site-specific wall drawing, done in ballpoint pen, that charts the history of the United States through a series of carefully selected themes. The works are loaded with references and linkages to a history of storytelling about nation and pride that is subjective, manipulative, amusing and heartbreaking.

Ethan Murrow received his B.A. from Carleton College and his M.F.A. from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work has been shown nationally and internationally and is included in many collections including the Guggenheim Foundation. He currently teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and his writing appears regularly in the Huffington Post.