Senior Studio Fall 2021

 The newsprint sheets make a connection with skin as they float in the hallway and move while people walk past them the newsprint curls and mends and scars much like skin. They are all about 5'2", the average height of North American women. Written in faint pencil in the center are names given to each shade. By leaving the newsprint colour as-is, it removes an immediate association with each shade and instead leaves the viewer to come to their own conclusion for what flesh, dusty beige, honey, etc would actually look like.

extension  in its current iteration is 11ft3in long. It will continue to grow with the addition of hair from future haircuts and will be displayed in spaces that remove the viewer's opportunity to touch. Displaying extension  in an enclosed space allows me to set hard boundaries that must be respected in ways that I often am unable to do for my own person.

Mary really helped me in focusing my thoughts to make them more cohesive and gave me some great resources to look at. I am excited to look at those over the Christmas break.  

Below is my application for the Prairie Crocus space at Stride Gallery and the response that it has been received by Eva Birhanu, curatorial resident. My name is Kaela Murphy (she/her) and I am interested in applying to the Prairie Crocus space. My practice is multidisciplinary, incorporating sculpture, drawing, and printmaking as I respond to unsolicited touching and uncomfortable conversations that I face as a biracial woman. Having been raised in Regina, and now residing in Lethbridge as I complete my final year of the BFA program in Studio Art at the University of Lethbridge, my lived experience has been one of confrontation often centred around and filtered through my hair.  I would like to utilize the Prairie Crocus space to display  extension . It is a braid made from my hair saved from previous haircuts. In its current iteration, it is 11' 3" long and will continue to grow with each future haircut. It represents the time and labour that goes into caring for my hair, as...

 These are all of the opportunities I am applying for this year so far and their requirements.

some comparisons have been made between Lichtenstein's prints and my mark-making studies. I may look into turning these into prints, but first I'm going to try and make a paintbrush.

 Through looking at the works of Khadijah Morley she references Bell Hooks' oppositional gaze. As defined by google:  The "Oppositional gaze", first coined by feminist, scholar and social activist Bell Hooks in her 1992 essay collection Black Looks: Race and Representation, is a  type of looking relation that involves the political rebellion and resistance against the repression of a black person's right to look . This really resonated with me as I confront the privileged gazes of those who chose to exoticize me.