Stephanie McBride looks at Sharon Murphy’s latest photographic series, which is informed by magic realism
The term ‘magic realism’, which originated in the field of art criticism in the 1930s, is a slippery one. It describes how dual realities, including magical elements, coexist to challenge an audience’s perceptions. In Angela Carter’s 1984 novel Nights at the Circus, for example, when a lavish setting is seen in the ‘cold light of early dawn’, readers learn that ‘the luxury… had been nothing but illusion, created by the candles of midnight’. Magic realism also informs ‘but here alone’, Dublin-based artist Sharon Murphy’s work in progress about the real and imaginary in Parisian carousels. The project arises from what she describes as a ‘longstanding interest in staged spaces and the performative in photography’.
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