Statement
Through performances and interventions I engage the public in a dialogue concerning their notions of service, perception, liberation, and derivations of power. To do this I employ the means by which I earn my living as research that informs my artistic practice. I find a job in a particular area of interest and then construct works that expose the embedded metaphors inherent to the occupation’s structure. This is done through the examination of categorical constructs that are perhaps taken for granted, such as the built environment, the service industry, security, and education. Over the past ten years this process has included extensive projects dealing with my careers in cabinetmaking, restaurant work, locksmithing, and yoga instruction. I wasn’t always conscious of this process as it began many years ago in a seemingly innocent way.
When I was 12 my older brother and I worked at a fish market in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Being the youngest I was only allowed to do the most menial and out of sight jobs, and my biggest responsibility was to slaughter lobsters. Lobsters with one claw are called “culls”, and they are difficult to sell because people love to eat claw meat. Every few days I would rummage through the big tanks and take out all of these “culls”. I then cooked, cracked, and separated all the meat so it could be sold in the shop. This was a very arduous job and to cope with it I turned it into an Olympic event. In this event there were an infinite amount of competitors, however they were all different incarnations of myself. I attempted to perfect the job like a figure skater would their routine by timing myself, talking to myself, and coaching myself to the gold. I never won or lost, however, occasionally I would shove a lobster tail in my mouth while no one was looking. I used this tactic for years and many unique Olympic events followed; floor mopping, hole digging, toilet scrubbing, or perhaps removing poorly placed used tampons that didn’t make it into the little baggies that are in the stalls of women’s restrooms. Clearly there are endless possibilities. At eighteen I moved to Boston. I worked with children for two years at a YMCA and then took a job in a small local cabinet factory. All the while I took night classes in whatever seemed interesting, but with an emphasis on drawing. Ironically I was never that interested in drawing. Instead, I wanted to learn how to “see” and how to connect my eyes to my hands. When I was 23 I applied and got into the San Francisco Art Institute and decided it was time to go to school full time. Prior to my arrival, I had never heard of performance or conceptual art. After the first month of classes in the New Genres Department I realized that I had been making art for almost my whole life and it had started the moment I split my first lobster. From there I dove into the practice.
My work has been shown nationally and internationally, in exhibition and performance contexts. Recent solo shows include exhibitions at Portland State University; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, and 667 Shotwell, San Francisco. I have also designed projects for The Thing Quarterly and 826 Valencia Street, Dave Eggers’ pirate store and writing workshop in San Francisco. This spring the S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium will be exhibiting documentation of past performances and commissioning a site-specific project in the city. My work has been reviewed in Artforum, and The Los Angeles Times, and has been highlighted in The New York Times. I received my BFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002.
Born in 1976, I live in San Francisco, am prone to napping, and enjoy eating bakers chocolate with my brother Matt.
“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.”
