Tricia Lawless Murray is a Los Angeles, CA based artist.
Text by Glen Erler : « I want to touch her or even get close enough to smell her yet I can only see her. Every crevice and texture of her snow-white skin. The plum red bruises that welt up on her like over ripe fruit that have fallen from a tree. I think we all wish we were in the same room. To me, it’s like witnessing a live performance on a stage where only a few privileged souls are let in to witness this act. The work of Tricia Lawless Murray brings the viewer in yet not too close. I’m wondering if someone else is in the room, standing just out of frame or did this take place some time before and the participant was politely relieved of their duties. Maybe. I’m not sure we need to know the details but I’ve concluded that everything that is happening is happening because she wants it to. I don’t want to know too much more. I just want to sit back and look through whatever peephole I can find and ponder the results of the painful memories that linger within all of us, yet I keep asking myself, does she need to do this? Is this a release? Does she get pleasure from this process? I want to say yes but as I’m not the only soul in the room, one is left to answer these questions for themselves. We need to dig deeper and look at the other side of Tricia, the softer side where faces fade in from darkness as if sculpted from a storm filled sky and where her soft focused nude body appears to be swimming through the murky depths of a bottomless sea. I then find nightscapes of harsh vacant alleys and even harsher dried shrubs that seem to be lit in a way allowing us to see every detail.
To me, I feel like I’m entering a crime scene and the images in front of me are where the crime may have happened along with the evidence thus far. I find myself around the corner and entering an open wooded area and feeling that something happened there. Maybe something happens there every night. Are these meeting places? Maybe this is Tricia’s starting line that then leads us to her next destination and where other things happen. She moves me from hard to soft and from the submissive to the beautiful with ease of which is almost a contradiction but then somehow fits the pieces together. It’s merely a play and she’s the star. The viewers think of themselves as being in control where in reality, she knows exactly what she is doing and maybe we’re just puppets and she lives for the pulling of our strings. The pleasure derives from this. It’s a small secret part of our daily lives where exists the hard and the soft… isn’t this what life is? I think so. The birth of a child and the death of another, all at the same time, everyday, everywhere. While one is full of rage, the other is full of joy. While one is ripped apart from tragedy, the other is shouting hallelujah. It’s just the way it is. I see all of this in Tricia’s work. The celebration of the female form and the harshness of our day-to-day reality. The pain but also the pleasure in the pain. It’s all there for us in our little bubbles to be witness to. Most of all, it is brave and I feel this is just what we as a society need is someone to come along and show us her view in it’s most raw form. Nothing is half way there. This is what Tricia Lawless Murray does and we are lucky to have been invited into her world and lucky that she is willing to share it with all of us. »
http://www.tricialawlessmurray.com
