artMovingProjects
166 North 12th Street, 917-301-6680
Williamburg
December 1, 2007 - February 24, 2008
Reception: Saturday, December 1, 7 - 9 PM
Web Site
The Longest Painting of Death is a digital work that takes an image of Albert Pinkham Ryder’s “The Race Track” (Death on a Pale Horse c.1896), enlarges it to the painting’s original size of 27 3/4” x 35 1/8”, stretches it digitally until it is one mile in length and then traverses it in 02:11:20 min, the average speed of the still fastest race horse, Secretariat. Murphy stretches the painting to the length of a racetrack, “moving” along the track on the screen, thereby encouraging the viewer to switch from the side of the course to the perspective of Death watching the landscape as it passes by. This piece is an extension of two “minimalist” works done almost ten years ago. The Mile Long Page and the Square Mile Page, both digital updates of Walter de Maria’s Vertical Kilometer, consist of a mile-long line of single black pixels and a square mile of black pixels, respectively.