Using forms of ‘masking’ to explore the materiality of digital enhancement in archival photographs, creating works which operate in the field of power and absence.
Sadie Murdoch, Abbottʼs El at Columbus, Broadway and Avenue, 2023, Giclée print, edition of 3; 58 x 42.6cm.
Image Description: A 1920s street scene in New York, with figures seen from above. The image has been colour saturated with blue, yellow and magenta. To the right is a partial view of an elevated railway. Off centre to the right, a section of the image showing a female figure and the tail end of a statue of a horse has been cropped, repeated in inverse colours and flipped horizontally.
Women of the ‘20s was a group show at Belmacz, including Coco Crampton, Agata Madejska, Hanna Mattes, Devin T. Mays, Sadie Murdoch, Lydia Ourahmane with Daniel Blumberg, Ronit Porat, Anna Wachsmuth and Ines Weizman, celebrating and responding to the freedom and innovation often associated with the 1920s. The show’s central premise was photography’s uncertain ontologies and subjectivities that inhere in the medium. Participating artists deployed liquid methodologies in order to create art works which confound categories, rather than operate as ‘hybrids’. Resisting and re-routing definitional structures and mechanisms of control, the artists in Women of the ‘20s considered ways in which contemporary and historical women, trans and queer artists, contributed to forms of cultural renewal in the first two decades of recent centuries.
Sadie Murdoch contributed two inkjet prints, Constellation and Abbott’s El at Columbus and Broadway Avenue (both 2023), produced specifically for the exhibition and presented in custom-built frames in oxidized steel. Together with Ines Weizman, the artist had input into the curatorial process and participated in the organisation of Jazz the Known: Artistic Experiments on Women of the ’20s, an evening of conversations and presentations at the Goethe-Institut London. This event was a collaboration between Belmacz, Goethe-Institut and the Royal College of Art, which took place on Friday 13 October 2023 in conjunction with the exhibition. Murdoch and five of the artists in the show shared an overview of their respective practices, followed by a short conversation with another artist. They were joined in conversation by artist and writer Dr. Rachel Garfield and curator and art-historian Penelope Curtis. Jazz the Known brought together the historical, methodical and personal connections between the contributors, and provided new insights into the critical potential of reflection and dialogue to creative and curatorial practices. Ideas around the visionary social and cultural forces that had been instigated and propelled by new technologies, as a well as a more inclusive and materialist view of that which constitutes the ‘Modern’, emerged from these conversations.
Left from right: Sadie Murdoch; Ronit Porat; Ines Weizman; Toby Upson. ʻJazz The Known: Artistic Experiments on Women of the ʼ20sʼ. In: Jazz The Known: Artistic Experiments on Women of the ʼ20s. Goethe-Institut London, 13 October 2023.
Image Description: Four presenters sit in a row, in mid conversation. There is a large projection in the background featuring a black and white image of a round old-fashioned alarm clock, the face of which is upside down.
Murdoch’s contribution to the exhibition engaged the way in which photographic devices operate as both concealing and revelatory through forms of ‘masking’ and the materiality of digital enhancement techniques. Constellation (2023) began with one of many widely available archival photographs of the Women members of the Bauhaus Weaving workshop. Murdoch covered a black and white image with sheer silk fabric embedded with reflective metallic fragments. The result was scanned at high-resolution during a two day ‘HiRESIDENCY’ at Equivalentbehaviour, an artist run project-space in London.
Often photographed together in a manner simultaneously staged and spontaneous, this particular group portrait was taken by Lotte Beese in 1927.
Murdoch describes the process in more detail:
‘I cropped it in order to place centrally the figure of Lise Beyer-Volger; Beyer-Volger was one of two putative models in the now iconic series of photographs by Erich Consemüller of Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair. Wearing a cotton and artificial silk dress designed in 1928 by Beyer-Volger, the woman is made anonymous by the addition of one of Oskar Schlemmer’s metallic masks. In one of Consemüller’s photographs, the figure’s head is swivelled unnaturally; the effect renders the woman clunkily robotic, a future echo from a mid 20th Century B movie.’
Sadie Murdoch, Constellation, Giclée print, 2023, 98 x 91 cm, original print in an oxidised steel frame.
Image Description: A black and white image of a group of 13 women, with one man at the rear. Some of the women are wearing shirts and ties, others dresses or skirts. The figures appear through a tightly woven mesh on which very small light coloured dots and hexagons are spread, as if across a view of a galaxy. The central female figure appears darker, as if in shadow.
‘The figure of Beyer-Volger in Beese’s image was later submitted to digital ‘burning’, in an attempt to reinforce her presence in the image. However, the process resulted in her ‘disappearing’ into a darker, more shadowy space, which conveys a sense of her erasure in the Consemüller’s image. Another unexpected outcome was that the multi-chrome reflections on the metallic fragments created a self-reflexive mechanical loop, where the scanner ‘sees it self seeing’. The high-resolution scanning processes also created a digital fusing of textile and photographic image, making possible new readings of the archival through the merging of the real and the photographic.’
For Abbott’s El at Columbus and Broadway, Avenue (2023), Murdoch’s starting point was a photograph of a New York City street scene by Modernist photographer Berenice Abbott. The silver gelatin original, titled The El at Columbus Avenue and Broadway, Lincoln Square, (1929), was taken from a high vantage point and abstracts the statue of a horse and several anonymous pedestrians, the most legible of which is a figure who embodies the ‘New Woman’ of the 1920s. Abbott is known for her iconic images of 20th Century American cities, and key figures in the Modernist movement, and has been the subject of other recent projects at Belmacz and Mimosa House. In Murdoch’s reworking, Abbott’s photograph was digitally manipulated and colour saturated, the central area excavated and rendered in negative, so that the statue and some of the figures are severed or appeared twice. Like Constellation, this work addresses issues of photographic ‘looking’, and creates plastic and layered spaces, which operate in the field of power and absence, via the partial, the incomplete, the crop and the edit.
Sadie Murdoch
In Sadie Murdochʼs recent projects, chromatic anomalies and unstable readings are deployed in order to provide an insight into the ways in which the photographic codes and conventions of Modernism emerge from the repression of subversive counter-narratives.
Born in 1965 in Hexham, Sadie Murdoch studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design and Leeds Metropolitan University. She was a student on the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, New York from 2003-2004, and an Abbey Rome Scholar at the British School at Rome in 2002.
Murdoch’s solo exhibition in 2016, SSS-MM, at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zürich, was accompanied by her artist book Omnipulsepunslide, published by Artphilein Editions.
She has staged other one-person exhibitions at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2007), the Agency, London (2008 and 2011), and the Henry Peacock Gallery and Domobaal, London (2002). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions including The Baroness, Mimosa House, London (2022), Utopia in Crisis, Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar, Rhapsody in Blue, Villa les Zéphyrs, Westende, I Dialogue Kinch,Belmacz, London (2021), Spectral Metropole, atthe Vžigalica Gallery, City Museum of Ljubljana, Slovenia (2012),and Gets Under the Skin at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York (2010). Her performance at Belmacz with Abbas Zahedi and Toby Upton, A Case of Med(dling)tation, was included in Performance Exchange, in 2021.
