PERMANENT COLLECTION

BRAD MCMURRAY

NATIONALITY: Canadian

DATES: b. 1954

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Brad McMurray was born in Penticton, BC, Canada, in 1951 and was raised in Calgary. McMurray attended Mount Royal University, Calgary and the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University) studying under Jim Breukelman and the Banff Centre of Fine Arts where he studied under Randy Bradley in the 1970s.

He has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and others. Although he has been a practicing artist/photographer for an extended time he has shown little interest in exhibiting his work until recently. Brad has exhibited widely and, most recently, had solo exhibitions at the Vernon Art Gallery in 2010 and 2016 and Cove Creek Gallery 2011. He is the recipient of a Canada Council Project Grant. Recent publications include Urbanautica Magazine 2011, The Editorial magazine 2012 & 2013. In 2016 the Burnaby Art Gallery acquired two large photographs for their Permanent Collection.

Speaking of his own work Brad McMurray writes: “My photographs focus on the mundane and ordinary world and I think that no subject is fuller of implications than this one. It is possible to find interest and pleasure in banality, disorder and the discarded. My work follows in the historical footsteps of art that reconstitutes our perception of everyday life (Duchamp’s Fountain and Emin’s My Bed) simply by asking the viewer to look at it. That which would otherwise be ignored is given a new existence as the surreal subject in my photographs.”