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Denver artist Lauri Lynnxe Murphy has been trying to break her addiction to petroleum products, but they keep popping up: in her photos, in her paintings and in her large-scale sculptures, too. “When you realize how many things trace back to petroleum,” she says, “you’re thinking, ‘It’s like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.’ You’re surrounded by all these horrible products that you don’t want to use.”
In May, she’ll be hitting the road in a tiny house — a small home on wheels — to discuss climate change with strangers around the country. But before she goes, she’s planning “one last hurrah” in a gallery. In her exhibit Lament, Lynnxe Murphy wallows in the guilty pleasure of using the very materials she loathes. She has created brightly colored abstract sculptures, paintings and photographs out of bitumen, resin, polyethylene paper and oil itself, using petroleum products to address ecological destruction. “A lot of the works have to do with oil and plastics and exploring the different materialities of these things and our current addiction to them,” she says. “There is a lot of sad, dark art in the show.”
Lament opens at 7 p.m. tonight at Leon, 1112 East 17th Avenue, where it runs through November 9. For more information, go to leongallery.squarespace.com or call 303-832-1599.
Sat., Oct. 11, 7 p.m.; Tuesdays-Sundays. Starts: Oct. 11. Continues through Nov. 9, 2014
