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Lucas Murgida: None of This is Real

Lucas Murgida
None of This is Real
July 7, 2018 – Ongoing

Opening Reception: Saturday, July 7 from 7-10pm

  • Artist seated with 3 participants, 2 are wearing black hoods

    Lucas Murgida: None of This is Real | July 7, 2018 – Ongoing

  • White Structure: A white, wooden-framed structure occupies a significant portion of the space. It has a door and appears to be a room within a room. Television: A television mounted on the wall within the structure displays a video or image. Framed Photographs: Three framed photographs hang on the wall opposite the structure, showcasing black and white images of people and possibly urban landscapes.
  • A white, wooden-framed structure occupies a significant portion of the space. It has a door and appears to be a room within a room. Lucas Murgida None of This is Real exhibition
  • Lucas Murgida None of This is Real exhibition

Through performance, installation, photographic documentation, and social practice, artist Lucas Murgida creates situations that allow audience members to experience very private moments in very public situations.   Thematically, his projects address ideas of service, perception, liberation, privacy, power, and labor  by utilizing his employment as research to inform his art practice. Having dissected his careers as a professional cabinetmaker, busboy, locksmith, and yoga-teacher, the artist utilizes the mundane aspects of human existence – such as furniture, locks, teachers, and service professionals – as raw material to craft artistic experiences. Murgida’s most recent research, working behind the scenes in the adult film industry, spawned an artistic investigation into the intimacy-of-the-self through the lens of judgment, privacy, commerce, privilege, and the utility of the body as a tool of labor.

As current Grand Central Art Center artist in residence, Murgida takes over the storefront gallery as a location of research and development of new ideas.   It is a space for the open possibilities of discoveries through GCAC’s philosophy of listening, assisting and connecting, with the institution providing the artist as much freedom as possible, with no expectations required in terms of concrete outcome.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
In 2002, Murgida received a BFA with honors from the New Genres department of the San Francisco Art Institute.  His work has been exhibited extensively nationally and internationally in performance, gallery, public, and museum contexts and has been reviewed in Art Forum, The New York Times, and Los Angeles Times.   Selected exhibitions include Conflux, New York City; Charles James Gallery, Los Angeles;  826 Valencia Street,  San Francisco; Portland State University, Portland, OR; and  S.M.A.K. (Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art), Ghent, Belgium. His works are included in the Berkeley Art Museum.  In 2010, Murgida was an artist in residency with  Vooruit Center for the Arts  in Ghent, Belgium and he is currently artist in residence at Grand Central Art Center, through the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.