Gwynn Murrill
OBIHIRO SPIRIT DEER
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe
June-July 1994
At a time when beauty in art is still widely suspect, it's a tough assignment to do animals, yet Gwynn Murrill has acquired a remarkable reputation for doing just that, and she has done it without sparing us their beauty. True, some of her models have had that redeeming dark side to which we more comfortably relate in a dangerous age: big cats, birds of prey, coyotes-these carry an edge of threat , a shiver of alien wildness that works to offset the sheer beauty of their natural forms. But what about deer? Lacking fangs or talons, haven't they been sadly, irredeemably Bambi-fied in the contemporary bestiary canon? What kind of a nerve does it take for a bona fide artist to tackle them?
It takes Gwynn Murrill's nerve. Or rather, perhaps, it takes the cool-eyed, unwavering focus on form with which she sidesteps all those issues that might distract us from her purpose. This foursome of Sitka deer was commissioned initially for a downtown shopping area in Obihiro, Japan, with the intention that they bring an element of the indigenous fauna of the surrounding parks into the bustling urban nexus. Installed in this original location, the male stands across the busy intersection, a hundred paces from the grouping of three females, their alert, sylvan attentiveness reflected in the posture of a momentary attitude: the turn of a head, the muscular contraction of a flank, the readiness of a leg bent for flight, the laying back or the pricking up of ears. These attitudes suggest an urgent, silent dialogue between the four that transcends the noisy passage of vehicles and people.
It's one of the ironies of our age, perhaps, that we use animal life to put us back in touch with our humanity. The unexpected presence of wild life in our midst is enough to give us pause, to slow down for long enough to reflect on who we have become, with all our technological advances, and what we are shifting inexorably, to our great loss, to the periphery of our vision and our lives. So how does Murrill manage this without resort to sentimentality? In part, it's a matter of dedicated abstraction, of paring everything away that is not absolutely necessary to perceive the form in all its purity: the eyes are the most prominent sacrifice in this respect, but along with them go the rest of the facial details, the texture of hair, the individuality of natural coloring. We are left with the pure animal-ness of the creature. Those endearing, quasi-human traits that we ourselves project on it are purposefully discouraged. And if her animals invite our touch, as they surely do, it is with the seduction of formal perfection, not the warm-and-cuddly impulse to be close to nature.
If these sculpted creatures can articulate an urban space, they also retain their impervious dignity when they stand alone, for it is inherent in their presence as completed works of art, sufficient unto themselves. Curiously, as with so much of Murrill's work, they seem in some quiet, unassuming way to belong exactly where they are, no matter where that is-from the busy intersection to the white-walled gallery space, or the suburban lawn. They seem to reach out and possess their environment. It is they who create meaning in the context, not the context that gives them reason for their being. Evoking the effortless power of nature for us, they yet remain apart from it, aloof in the privilege of their place, across from us, on the opposite side of the chasm of mortality. They remind us at once of our sense of difference from the rest of the natural world, and our yearning to be one with it. They do not need to see us, as we need to see them. A celebration of life, they exist apart from the smallness of our individual lives. And this may be why the artist calls them "Spirit Deer."
