It is at the edge of the known that science and mysticism
function interchangeably, cooperate, share their findings, and mutually
influence. This is a region where the
profound and the preposterous cohabitate, swap wardrobes, and are confused for
one another.
My work is an anagoge of
particular sources: the pop-narratives
of my formative years, the historical and contemporary practice of painting,
and the variously scientific, pseudoscientific, and mystical approaches to
gathering and generating knowledge about consciousness and the universe. That is to say, I am making a mystical
interpretation of these elements, plumbing them for linkages and insights from
the realm of the visible/material/known to the quizzical, questionable, and
ever-teasing domain of the unknown.
What is seen as the purely physical, material, mechanical,
organic brain manages to yield the decidedly more mysterious properties of
consciousness, mind, emotion, and qualia. It may even be
driven into states of euphoria, ecstasy, and transcendence by any number of
various intellectual, physical, and/or chemical seeds. Likewise, the physicality of paint in my work
functions as the seat of the transcendent, numinous sphere.
Just as likely to appear in my work are conceptual nuclei –
confounding confluences of previously heterogeneous notions which come together
into one. The eschatology of David
Bowie, the Mayans, and Terrence McKenna meet in a video datestamp. Liberty, Otherness, the elfin, and the
hallucinogenic are all present in a painting‘s reference to a certain
historical hat, the Phrygian Cap.
I see myself as a cataloguer and hopeful practitioner of
both rigorous academic inquiry and deviant epistemic methods. In the base of my works, I aim to create a
kind of pregnant chaos which functions as the spilled entrails of a
soothsayer’s sacrifice, out of which both the viewer and I can divine profound
and preposterous secrets of the universe.
Ryan Murray