Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia is pleased to present Re-source, a solo exhibition of collage works by Bay Area artist Katie Murken. The work for this exhibition was created during Murken’s artist residency at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California in 2022. Over her three month residency Murken used Kala’s digital lab to design, edit and print various components of her mixed media collages.  

Re-source, Katie Murken’s newest body of work, is a meditation on the regenerative power of change. The work likens the devaluation of domestic labor with the stripping of nutrients from the soil within agricultural society. In Hungry Ghost, a collage from 2022, Murken layers redacted grocery store ads and photographs of fallow fields over radiating strokes of viscous red stain. The tolls of extensive overuse are presented as image and metaphor, juxtaposed to create a dystopian post fertile landscape. The ads are stripped of their content, much like the nutrients are extracted from the soil of a field, leaving barren, empty tracks.

The shells of the dissected circulars that Murken layers into much of the work in the exhibition speak to over consumption and underestimation. They serve as a metaphor for a specific type of domestic labor, most often performed by individuals cast in the role of mother. It is the planning, the preparing, the saving, the reusing, the cleaning, the tasks that go largely unseen and unrecognized. Like land that is asked to produce the same crop year after year until the structure of the soil deteriorates, unseen labor strips the soul of its fecundity.  

Murken repeats the use of divaricating gestures of red ink throughout the exhibition. The gestures vacillate between streams of blood, plow rows, and spider legs that lurk beneath the surface of the collaged elements. The watery marks resist the rigid lattice of cut ads and the dot matrix found in mass produced printed materials. In The Cut, printed photographs of dry farming fields split apart, making way for the swelling tide that soaks the paper beneath.

Katie Murken speaks of her work as a healing ritual. One that processes the detritus of domestic life in a capitalist, patriarchal society from a source of oppression into a location of power. The transformation of these materials is like the rotation of crops; an acknowledgement of what has been taken, a shift of expectations and an opportunity to regenerate. Meticulous mining and attention to materiality add up to the transformative power of Murken’s work. With Re-source this transformation becomes a nutritive site.

Essay by Nichola Kinch

Katie Murken (b. 1980, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is an artist working in sculpture, collage and installation.  She works with found objects which are unremarkable and familiar from everyday life in consumer culture.  Plastic bags and grocery circulars are mundane, even repugnant, yet for Murken speak to the common aspects of human experience.  Murken’s process is driven by the challenge to transform these unwanted materials into objects of beauty and power.  Her work has been exhibited at an.ä.log gallery, (San Francisco), Woolf Gallery (London), The Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA), Grounds for Sculpture (Hamilton, NJ), The Soap Factory (Minneapolis, MN), and The Contemporary Arts Center of Las Vegas (Las Vegas, NV). Her work is included in the collections of The Pennsylvania Convention Center, The William Paterson University, and the J. Edgar Louise S. Monroe Library at Loyola University.  Murken holds an MFA in Book Arts and Printmaking from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and BFA with Honors from The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA.