All Photos By Gail (Click on Any Image to Enlarge)

Clive Murphys’s Post Neo Proto Demo exhibit is one that Geoffrey and I literally stumbled onto while in the same West 26th Street building for an entirely different exhibit. But I was immediately drawn into the Magnan Metz Gallery’s street level space because I cannot resist an exhibit that mixes Contemporary art with Modern Furniture Design. So, yeah.

Post Neo Proto Demo, Murphy’s third solo show at the gallery, “comments on how ones living space is a representation of a created personal philosophy” – that is certainly true in my apartment! – exploring the relationship between the radical and the domestic.

Taking the legacy of Modernism and the avant-garde as its point of departure, Murphy deconstructs and reassembles, delicately blending the familiar with uncanny, the purposeful with the dysfunctional.

The exhibition includes altered domestic tableaus comprised of sculpture made with modified domestic materials. The result allows the viewer to participate in Murphy’s inversion of the classic furniture showroom by blending the purposeful with dysfunctional.

In addition, new works drawn and spray painted on pages from iconic furnishing catalogs mirror the arranged living space tableaus with a tongue-in-cheek disruption of idealized domesticity.

I wish that some of these items were for sale at IKEA, because I would totally love to see them in my apartment. At any rate, I left with few inspired new design ideas of my own.

Clive Murphy’s Post Neo Proto Demo Will be on Exhibit Through April 12th, 2014 at Mangan Metz Gallery, Located at 521 West 26th Street, in the Chelsea Gallery District.