KATIE MURRAY

S.O.S.

OCTOBER 2022

Back in the early aughts, I briefly toured the US with the prog-punk band An Albatross, whose music can best be described as jubilant excess. My husband had just joined the band as a drummer, and I was looking for any excuse to get on the road.

It was all I expected from a tour- a boozy and hazy few weeks, where I was more likely to see the sun rise, bleary-eyed, than to see it set. Each new day was different and exactly the same. Shifting landscapes and topographies flowed past the van windows accompanied by an endless stream of gas stations, strip malls, main streets, night clubs, warehouses, motels, merch tables, squats, sweat, and bad sleep. Wake up slowly, rinse and repeat.

Time had a way of existing parallel to the outside world but not quite in sync with it.

Even still, we could all sense the country was shifting. 911 was still fresh in our minds, we had been at war for years and signs of the recession were beginning to creep in. People were on edge and angrier than I had anticipated. Social media was still in the MySpace days and had yet to morph into the biased creation of reality that it is today.

Fast forward a decade and a half, to the early stages of the pandemic, where once again my relationship to time began to warp. Each day different and exactly the same. This time, the anger- along with fear, loss, nostalgia, and loneliness- was palpable.

Homebound and desperate to move beyond the small parameters of my existence; I imagined a wild cross-country ride. This fictional journey, constructed from both personal and sought-after footage; through space, time, and memory seemed to beckon a sensory overloaded score. Hence, a re-working of An Albatross’ “3000 Light Years By Way Of The Spacehawk”.

The resulting video, The Serpent Beguiled Us, and We Ate was installed on Fish Island- where a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day.

Here, time is illusive, refracted, and abstracted ebbing and flowing like the tide. Existing parallel to the outside world but not quite in sync with it.

Katie Murray