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DEC. 11/10
Caitlin Boyce
DEC. 24/10
Murray Allen
murrayALLEN (1930 - 2010)
Murray Allen passed away on Monday (December 20, 2010). I received the e-mail  informing me yesterday morning. I didn’t know Murray well, so I can’t give you many  details on his life, but wow did I ever appreciate his character.  I met him in his home to view his work.  He said, “I’m the kind of guy who thinks a  man should have a cat” and he shared his house by the stadium with a few.  They prowled around his many work  spaces.  I wish I had more photos of him  and his house – the whole house was a working studio.  Well organized in some places with hundreds  of spice jars containing the knick knacks and broken pieces that he used in his  work.  Then there were the linked up  desks in his dining room, filled with evidence of collection and  reconstruction.  They were like life  rafts strung together in a post-apocalyptic flooding of our world built entirely  out of what floated up from the alleyways.   He said that at 80 he was working against time to finish all the  pieces.  He told me he was losing his  sight as he showed me the self-portraits titled Lamentation for a Macular Degenerate 1 & 2.   I saw him around town a few times after  that; at an art show or sweating out the heat with the rest of us at Art  Walk.  Like I said, I didn’t know him  well, but he was always genuine and he was a great artist.
The following  quote is about Murray Allen’s work in the  show titled KA-POW!.  It was held at  Profiles Gallery.  The article appeared  in Vue and was written by Mary  Christa O’Keefe.  
“Murray Allen’s found  object mash-ups seem created by visitors to our world, artifact assemblages of  human culture circa 21st Century. His creations bear a Victorian stylistic  similarity to curio cabinets, including the juxtaposition of the natural with  the theosophic. Joseph Cornell, shorn of the burden of inarticulate desires, could  relate to Allen.
“His pieces are tellingly inaccurate in their assumptions, like the metallic  ripples in “The Big Burp” circling vintage constellation maps and Pac-Man,  suggesting a universe forever expanding and gobbled up. Clocks, circuitry,  rulers, gears, keys, game pieces, planes and animal life are the currency of  Allen’s realms—things from order, jumbled in chaos, misrepresenting order. His  unreal interpretations, represented in the disposable junk of pop culture, show  a world losing its grip on causality.”
Next is an interview with Murray that appeared with his work  in issue #6 of Notebook Magazine.
Interview by Rhian Ireland
You definitely work  from found objects, so where or how do you find your objects?
I have a house full of junk.  Garage sales, flea markets, thrift shops, secondhand stores, dollarstores,  streets and alleys, garbage dumpsters, trash dumps on vacant lots, in the river  valley and ravines, and along country roads. I find stuff everywhere I go. I am  always on the