Gallery review: 'Certainty Principle' / 'Ocus'

One of the greatest gifts an artist can give is to help us see our world anew. Michael David Murphy, a keen-eyed photographer and equally able writer, combines his skills to do just that in his five-year retrospective at Spruill Gallery.

The exhibition encompasses several bodies of work. The largest group of photos belongs to his “Certainty Principle” series. Murphy has roved the world, photographing whatever catches his eye: the white stripes on the road aligning exactly with the red stripes on the hood of a car; the crack in a stone bench; a graffiti outline of a heart on the curb between diverging roads; the word “luck” chiseled in a headstone.

He delights in the purely visual — color rhymes, repeating shapes, complex layered planes — and in wordplay. He gets a kick out of amusing juxtapositions and quirky signs. And he has a knack for discovering the metaphorical resonance in ordinary circumstances.

Take the stone bench. Murphy, who must have sat or lain on the ground to get the straight-on view, frames it so that we not only see the crack but also implications: One end is already sagging infinitesimally and will eventually crack off. It’s a mini “memento mori.”

Murphy puts words in his images in “Certainty Principle.” He puts images into words on his website, www.Unphotographable.com. These pithy texts concern the photo that got away. Sometimes he just didn’t take it, but more often the duration, personal response or meaning are a bit more than he senses a photo can capture. The implication is that no one medium can do it all.

Murphy presents his little essays at the gallery as an installation in a hallway. He writes his evocative descriptions and poetic musings on the walls in pencil and draws a line from each one to a framed sheet of blank sheet of paper. You can also listen to him read them on the iPod provided.

The installation concept is still a work-in-progress. It might be more effective to make the words more visually imposing (darker color, thicker lines?) to contrast more with the empty frames and to eliminate the real photos now interspersed among the texts, which are confusing and superfluous.

Nevertheless, the texts are powerful and enchanting. Murphy is an artist who experiences the world intensely and takes joy in sharing what he’s discovered, whether in carefully composed images or equally vivid words. Murphy’s work communicates the thereness of real experience.

Margaret Fletcher makes a stunning debut in her concurrent exhibition of drawing and paintings. She composes these ethereal abstractions using press-on letters that are no bigger than the head of a pin. She has the crisp Helvetica letters specially made and places them with the precision of an architect, which she is, who knows that God is in the details.

The letters are fixed, like insects in amber, by layers of milky, translucent encaustic (wax), sometimes infused with an aqueous blue-green. Her application is so extremely thin and smooth that it makes other encaustic paintings look vulgar.

These small works may evoke the stars in the night sky, swarms of microscopic beings, or other naturally occurring patterns. In one series, the letters hover at the edges, a suggestion of dispersal. Mostly, they are elegant, meditative and really, really beautiful.

Kudos to gallery director Hope Cohn for bringing these Atlanta artists to the fore.