Fashion Island

Maura Murnane

11/13/2015 - 12/19/2015

Opening Reception: Friday, November 13, 7-11pm

In an effort to explore alternative ways to support artists, MASS announces its first ever annual art award and exhibition—MASS Solo Cup. Selected through a national open call, applications were reviewed by MASS collective members with the chosen artist awarded the opportunity to mount a solo show in our 1500 sq. ft. gallery, plus a monetary honorarium of $1,000 to assist in its realization.

MASS is proud to present our 2015 Solo Cup awardee, Irvine-based artist Maura Murnane and her solo exhibition Fashion Island.

Even if we left tomorrow, we would be here eternally, repeating consecutively the moments of this week, powerless to escape from the consciousness we had in each one of them — the thoughts and feelings that the machine captured. We will be able to live a life that is always new, because in each moment of the projection we shall have no memories other than those we had in the corresponding moment of the eternal record, and because the future, left behind many times, will maintain its attributes forever.

— Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel

Titled after ambitiously/dreamily/nostalgically-named shopping districts in the Orange County area, this show consists of oversize prints, not photographs but made from photographic materials; appropriated from a set of consecutively shot images. They are flattened, condensed into a single frame, and then expanded to larger-than-life size.

The flux of lossiness appears as waves of high-and-low detail expanding outwards. From digital primordial slush piles, there is a suggestion of figures on a field; people, sort of.

Maura was born in 1983 in Dhahran Saudi Arabia. She is currently working towards an MFA at UC Irvine, and she received her BFA in Design from UT, Austin. Previously employed in and around the industries of fashion and commercial photography in NYC, her work focuses on dissonant experience as it relates to totally controlled environments (in retail, housing, the work place, and so on).