Robert Holland Murray Parallax(e)

I began this series in 1992. In these pieces, notions of beauty are used as means of concealing and even falsifying the real danger of the object, much the way that aesthetics are employed by gun manufacturers to disguise the horrific potential of handguns. Ultimately, these pieces are themselves weapons, capable of inflicting bodily harm yet presented to the viewer as works of Art.

My primary concern in this work was to employ or activate both real space and illusionary space. The tension of the illusionary/real space relationship causes each piece to function as a parallax, shifting in the viewer’s perception from beauty to danger and back again.