Lucas Murgida

Abridged Statement:

Through performances and interventions my work blurs the line between public experiences and private examinations. By confronting the audience’s relationship to everyday objects and public servants my projects question who is in control at any given moment and push the boundaries of our perceived freedoms. To explicate these ideas, I draw upon my experiences as a professional locksmith, cabinetmaker, restaurant worker, and yoga instructor.

A graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, I was born in 1976, live in San Francisco, and my work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Art Forum.

Full Statement:

Through performances and interventions my work disrupts the rules that structure our public experiences and private examinations, while aiming to interrogate the often-unspoken conventions that govern both. The projects utilize forms that vary from open experiments in public space to highly ritualized performances in galleries. Throughout, I aim to understand the place for symbolic gesture in the construction of meaning, and to both complicate and confront the myths that riddle this process: privacy, purity, and objectivity.

In one set of investigations, I undermine expectations of comportment in public space. These pieces complicate the rules that govern public situations and often require willing (and at times un-willing) submission from viewers. In Private(s) (2010), men who use a public urinal in Ghent are exposed to the street traffic through the careful placement of a mirror, undermining their expectation of privacy. In 9/10 (2008), a free cabinet on a New York City street harbored a stowaway (I only emerged once the cabinet was adopted), disrupting the understanding of that object as abandoned. An open question pervades these interventions: what happens when unspoken rules are violated?

In ritualized endurance works, I critique aspirations of purification and transcendence by injecting bodily ritual (nakedness, incense burning, and burial) with emotional mortification. Symbolic characters, such as a “vile hero”, pit bull, and viewers, carry out a plotline in a charged, carefully lit room detailed with prepared props. Again, submission and endurance are required from viewers because physical aspects of the environment can make it difficult for them to breathe or stand and moral provocations challenge their ability or desire to watch. In Egress (2007), I laid bound and naked on the floor, chained to a pit bull. I controlled the door to the space, choosing when viewers could enter and leave. In an adjacent room with a similarly controlled passageway, an audio track described the experience of training a dog to perform oral sex. Viewers were likewise bound to the contract they (perhaps unwittingly) entered when they came to the space and surrendered their ability to leave at will. Empathy becomes a mute point because the “vile hero” is not someone who will save, or someone who must be saved, but a comical, grotesque, and ever-groping character whom some viewers view as evil and others see as generous.

Both bodies of work can be read as behavioral experiments, but experiments that intentionally fail to shed light on universal human tendencies. Instead, they signal the volatility of everyday interactions, and reveal each one to be a tentative, vulnerable contract. Objectivity and linearity are derailed by the addition of an un-navigable element: an entryway that a viewer cannot control, an absurd narrative that can’t be avoided, or an un-willed act of public indecency. These pieces are not meant to teach viewers something, but to set up conditions in which variables yield manipulated and unanticipated ends. Though these works argue that we can alter or break our public conventions and personal patterns they do not pronounce the inherent freedom of viewers. Rather, they escort viewers to a different (and perhaps unwanted) set of possibilities in everyday situations.

My work has been extensively displayed nationally and internationally in performance, gallery, and museum contexts and has been reviewed in Art Forum, The New York Times, The L.A. Times, and Art Week. Last summer two of my photographs were purchased by the Berkeley Art Museum and last spring I was a resident at the Vooruit Center for the Arts in Ghent, Belgium. A graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, I was born in 1976, live in San Francisco, work as a locksmith and occasionally teach yoga. Lastly, if I were to run for public office I would stand on a platform firmly committed to napping, snacking, and tasteful naughtiness.

“Close Calls: 2007” at Headlands Center for the Arts By Mark Van Proyen Artweek, March 2007, Volume 38, Issue 2

“…There were a lot of photographs in Close Calls 2007. But-how to put this elegantly? -most failed to distinguish themselves. The exceptions were stunning works by Nadim Roberto Sabella and Lucas Murgida… Murgida’s photos (Locksmith and The Locksmithing Institute of Lost Keys Nos. 1+4) were documentations of the artist “performing” (i.e. working) his day job as a locksmith, or as a teacher of locksmiths. While the depicted goings-on did seem laced with many allegorical portents of a surrealist provenance, the photos themselves had a composed stateliness rarely seen in most photographic documentation, and seemed to have knowing relationship to the ways that high-renaissance painters staged their own allegorical figures.”