Katie Murken

katiemurken.com | @katiemurken

Katie Murken explores myths of the California landscape in fragmented collages of Salinas Valley fields overlayed with grocery store print ads.

Katie Murken Artist Statement:

I was inspired to create my new series of collages as a way to illuminate the deep connection between the land, the humans who depend upon it and the systems that seek to exploit them both.  I am using grocery ads to incorporate the perspective of Mothers and caretakers whose service to humanity is undervalued and who are often oppressed rather than celebrated.  The grocery ads are a potent symbol because they carry both a personal and a collective significance.  For me, they conjure up memories of my Mother clipping coupons every week as a way to create monetary value from a job (Motherhood) that had none.  For the collective, these ads represent the systems that commodify food and their dangerous impact on land and lives.  To create these works I remove the content from the grocery ads to reveal an underlying grid structure which I then layer with photographic images of fields laying fallow in California’s Salinas Valley.  When combined, the images evoke feelings of imprisonment, power, control and loss.  At the same time, I want my careful deconstruction of the ads to suggest that the smallest acts of care and nurturance, often performed by women and those in the role of caretaker, can generate new patterns and possibilities for how we relate to the land and to each other.

Checklist (left to right):

1. Tabula: Pick 4 and $ave, Cut up grocery ads and inkjet print on Somerset paper, 15” x 22”, 2020, $3000

2. Tabula: Boneless, Cut up grocery ads and inkjet print on Somerset paper, 11” x 15”, 2020, $2000

3. Tabula: However You Eat You Save, Cut up grocery ads and inkjet print on Somerset paper, 15” x 22”, 2020, $3000

4. Tabula: Deals on the Horizon, Cut up grocery ads and inkjet print on Somerset paper, 15” x 22”, 2020, $3000