Jugular Magazine -Todd Murphy, An Ongoing Voyage By - Barbara Stehle , 2017

BOATS

Boats appear in wider, larger variations in other works, sometimes with sails, sometimes without. The object is central to Todd’s current narrative. Boats held the fate of men, helped them survive or lead them to their ultimate fate. Fishermen’s boats and the Middle Passage slave ships were at two opposite ends of survival. Todd’s boat collections and installations embody a wide range of meaning. They evoke conquer and colonization, discoveries and survival. They also speak of terrible loss and tragic fate. Boats are an old signifier of displacement and adventure. An embarkation with transcendental meaning in the artist’s iconography. Murphy has a composition called Ecce Homo, Ecce Astro Navis made of a collection of numerous toy boats, wheeled structures and planes. The title speaks for itself: we as humans travel. We explore and migrate. Our voyages, near and far, write our histories. History, even fictional, has its own map, its own territory. Todd Murphy knows this and in the end, this is what his epic work continues to chronicle.

Todd has two new vast installations in the making. One comprises three boat shells hanged in space. They look ghostly and grand, like the remnants of an odyssey. The other installation features a gigantic embarkation, pointing up like a rocket ship ready for launch. It links the boat to the myth of the next conquest, the space odyssey we have already started.