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, personal desires, and public servants my projects question who is in control at any given moment and push the boundaries of our perceived freedoms. For many years I have used my employment as research to explicate these ideas and have drawn upon my experiences as a professional locksmith, cabinetmaker, restaurant worker, yoga instructor, and worker in adult film industry.
A graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, I was born in 1976, and live in San Francisco, My work has been displayed nationally and internationally in performance, gallery, public, and museum contexts and has been reviewed in Art Forum, The New York Times, and The L.A. Times
“…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.”
“Close Calls: 2007” at Headlands Center for the Arts By Mark Van Proyen Artweek, March 2007, Volume 38, Issue 2
