wil murray
Wil Murray is more influenced by literature than by visual art, a fact made clear by the title of his contribution to the Alberta Biennial. The Onlyes Power Is No Power takes its name from Russell Hoban's post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker. The phrase encapsulates the main character's revelation during a séance and, as Murray explains it, means “power actually lies in not struggling for power, it lies in giving up the idea of power.” The five-piece series on display at the Walter Phillips Gallery traces two overlapping narratives. One centres on Hoffman's Novelty Circus, which was based in Humboldt, Sask. from 1932 to 1943. Murray's greatgreat-uncle was the ringmaster and toured Western Canada until the circus was disbanded due to travel restrictions during the Second World War. “About six months after the circus ended, in exactly the same geography, Japanese balloon bombs called Fu-Go started to land,” Murray says, adding that the bomb was “a Rube-Goldberg-looking device that hung from a 10-metre diameter balloon, floated over in the jet stream and landed randomly on the prairies.” Murray undertook two 4,000-kilometre, seven-day (“I was fast, but Canadian dimensions, you know?”) tours, one in the summer, the other in winter. All told, he paid two visits to 10 locations that had seen both the circus and a Fu-Go. He shot double exposures of each location. For the shots in the summer, he had the circus in mind; in the winter, his thoughts were on the bombs. He then painted over top of the negatives, collaged the results and then digitally printed the final five pieces (each represents two locations). “I wind up talking about it as a bit of a time-travel story: me and the balloon bomb and my greatgreat-uncle travel between two locations in each five of these pieces,” he says. Murray, who previously split his time between Okotoks and Berlin but now is based in Germany, considered the recent terrorist attacks in Europe and the U.K. while he was working on the piece. “It's really front of mind: the limited control that you have,” he says. “And I suppose that violence marks out its territory in a way. These 10 locations, while they were sites of performance and creative things from my family, were also sites of something very dangerous, potentially, to family members of mine. “I felt this closeness to my great-great-uncle because, had the war not stopped his circus,” he continues, “he could've wound up underneath one of these bombs. It was a meditation on how some things stop us from doing things but also save us from death.”