AMBROSE RHAPSODY MURRAY

The images in Dismembered, Unburied, Remember? are archival photographs. They show images of young African girls being groped in front of the camera by European men most likely from the late 1800s and early 1900s. The main photograph of the piece I altered digitally, making the image watery and essentially removing the male figures. The image was then digitally woven. The smaller archival photograph is printed on velvet at the center of the work. The woven tapestries in my work are digital weavings created at a fiber mill thirty minutes from my studio in North Carolina. While touring their facilities, the director shared with me that their largest clients are Black funeral homes. These weavings are instilled with dual meanings as vehicles for Black mourning, memorial and funerary practices, but also the reality and reliability of Black death in this country as theorized in Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake. Influenced by Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, and other Black feminist theorists, I wanted to find ways to bear witness to buried stories from the archive without recreating a narrative of abject violence, victimization or "resilience." Through fabrics misshapen, draped, cut apart, sewn together, and blurred/masked/hidden imagery, I aim to visualize the complicated nature of memory, remembrance and re-telling an account of violence or harm. Feeling and memory connected to cloth/textiles and archival photographs are central themes in my work.

See this work featured in The Studio Museum in Harlem Collection.

Whispers From the Archive, I Dream In Blue (2022)

In Whispers From the Archive, I Dream In Blue, I've collected several archival images, a mixture of colonial photographs and glamour portraiture, and made them into silk cyanotypes. The girls and women pictured are the ghosts who come to me on the sidewalks and in my daydreams. They are the blue haunts, roaming hallways and lingering between our conversations, here to remind us of our past and to hold truth to our present.

Where peaches may sour and rot, where stars may spangle (2021)

Honeypot (2021)

Pressure, Gravity, Silence, Impossibility, The Act of Narration (2022)

Interstitial to, of, for… (2022)

Phthalo memory (2022)

Phthalo Memory shows an image of my living maternal grandmother (top left), blurred and digitally woven. The figure in the center right is my late, great grandmother, Grandma LoLo -- her graduation photo printed on a thicker netting material. Another warped image of a dancer curves across the center and downwards. And the purple background is an archival portrait photograph, positioned upside down. Purples and violets are very important colors in my work. When I was battling illness in 2020 (unrelated to COVID), I was told to use "la luz violeta" or "the violet flame" as a healing tool. I feel my work with blues/purples, archival photographs and recently my own family photos is to excavate generations of buried emotions and memories that have been stuck within my family system, as well as within our bodies, leading to illness across my matrilineal line. I am trying to make sense of the disjointed relationships and stories of the women in my family, but also honoring them, their beauty/complicatedness and longing to connect with them. The subverted triangle frame could represent matriarchal leadership, subverted hierarchies, a family tree, stories and information that are missing out of the frame. All of my work is an attempt to make sense of the memories and stories that make up who I am, and with each work, to do so in a more clarified way.

She LoLo A Beautiful Violet (2022)

Memory Box (2022)

The girl who fell from the sky (2020)