So the land was real land, but was never truly intended to exist
anywhere except as an idea in the consumer’s mind. This confusion,
and the tension between the various parties’ expectations, nicely
opens up the complicated relationship between land and landscapebetween a physical place and the accumulated human and social
lenses through which we view it.
Now fully detached from the land that they signify, Klondike Big
Inch deeds are readily available for sale online. Revisiting this bizarre
property and settlement microcosm, I have been collecting these
deeds for the last year. While in Dawson, my project has involved
locating each corresponding one-inch land parcel using survey plans
and GPS. Using the physical deeds themselves as the material for
tiny paper sculptures, I have built camps, homesteads, claims, and
the various other built objects and environments of this second
imaginary Gold Rush. Photographed on their respective lots, the
scale of the resulting landscapes is confused, allowing the sculptures
to become models for larger potential sites. In the end, I see the
exhibited project as a complementary paradox: the imagined space
of the deed finally made real by its location and documentation, and
the real space of the land made imaginary- transformed into model,
picture, and landscape.
Kevin Michael Murphy is a Vancouver-based artist working
primarily in three dimensions, using a variety of materials, often
in combination with pre-existing systems, cycles, or organisms.
From his contemporary urban perspective, and against a backdrop
of growing environmental crises, Murphy explores the ways that
humans interact with the living world around them in material,
economic, and imaginative terms.
Murphy received his BFA from the University of British Columbia,
Vancouver in 2009, and went on to work there for a number of years
as UBC’s Drawing, Painting & Sculpture Technician. Past projects
have included Atla