Michael Weinstein

Gifted with sensitivity to place and light, and practicing an aesthetic of clarity--even when his images are shadowed--Robert Murphy is most of all a master of elegant and complex compositions that are built around the seductive attraction of corridors and passageways. Murphy's stunning black-and-white and color photographs of Chicago's urban landscape--taken at night, dawn and dusk--place us poised to cross bridges, walk through underpasses and down lonely streets, and step lightly along rooftop ledges. A feeling of mystery and promising excitement pervades Murphy's studies; we are on a journey, arrested for a moment by the beckoning prospect before us, striving to hold on to a moment of suspension in involving beauty as we feel an insistent impetus to move into the unknown. Murphy's solitude is not freighted with existential angst, but with the intoxication of adventure.

Robert Murphy shows at Stolen Buick Studio, 1303 West Chicago, (312)226-5902, through November 14.

(2004-10-20)

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