For the first time in Soap Factory history, a single artist has filled all 12,000 square feet of the Minneapolis gallery’s cavernous rooms with a single installation. In fact, Irish artist Clive Murphy’s series of inflatable sculptures — made from duct-taped black garbage bags, filled with air by a series of perpetually whirring fans — were especially made for the Soap Factory’s rough-hewn spaces.
As you walk into (and over and around) the structures in “Almost Nothing,” you can’t help but think of those giant inflatable castles for kids’ birthday parties. In fact, Murphy’s work playfully requires you to interact with it in much the same way: To cross from room to room, you have to hike up a leg and crawl over the tubes. In an interview with staff at the Soap Factory, he calls his inflations “both monumental and ridiculous.”
Murphy works in a variety of media and forms, but he’s consistently interested in how we interact with the cultural flotsam and jetsam that wash up all around us, and which we rarely notice. Murphy’s pieces appropriate and call to attention the lewd spam cluttering our inboxes, discarded audio cassette tapes found in our waste bins, the diagrammed paperwork that tells us how to assemble the mass-produced stuff filling our homes.
An unexpected consequence of wandering through “Almost Nothing” is a renewed appreciation for the post-industrial, architectural peculiarities of the Soap Factory space itself. Like so many one-time manufacturing sites in the Twin Cities that have been repurposed to serve as galleries and studio spaces, the Soap Factory (once the National Purity Soap Co. building owned by Pillsbury) has a dilapidated grandeur; its warm imperfections and crumbling corners are especially appealing set against the severe black contours of Murphy’s garbage-bag inflations.
See more examples of this emerging artist’s body of work, as shown in major cities around the world, by visiting his website, and watch an interview with the artist, given on the occasion of an earlier show of similar work at the Soap Factory in 2006, by clicking here.
Clive Murphy’s installation “Almost Nothing” will be on view at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis through April 5.
