Take Heed and Tremble
Ryan Sarah Murphy
New York, New York
Take Heed and Tremble, 2007
Mixed media
This piece pairs the torn pages of The White Man’s Bible with 12-inch wooden skewers. Most of the text from this racist literature is obscured as each page is tightly bound and glued in place. The skewers are painted red and white and bundled together, suggesting a dangerous cluster of bottle rockets. What’s missing is any indication of a fuse. These factitious explosives are rendered mute –inert and ineffective.
Bio
Ryan Sarah Murphy was born in Rutland, Vermont, and currently lives and works in New York, New York. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2001. Her work has been shown in gallery and museum exhibitions in New York and around the U.S. “I make sculptural collages from found cardboard and construct objects made of discarded remnants,” she says. “I am driven by process and repetition (collecting, sorting, sectioning, deconstructing). My work deals with issues of containment, identity, landscape, and the boundaries between the private and the public self.”