Voyager: Todd Murphy

Atlanta, Georgia — Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present Voyager, its second solo exhibition of works by the late American artist Todd Murphy (1962–2022). On view from September 26 through November 29, 2025, this exhibition proposes an encounter between image and environment, memory and myth, object and invocation. The exhibition draws from Murphy’s deep engagement with the natural world as an animated force: stage, initiator, and oracle. It offers an experience of nature as sacred and unknowable—sublime, austere, and glistening with memory—where materials speak, and images function as maps of survival.

 

Murphy’s practice unfolds across photography, sculpture, textile, installation, and assemblage. Each material choice emerges from its capacity to reveal meaning and carry memory. While photography recurs throughout the exhibition, it operates as one tool among many thus extending rather than defining the artist’s practice. The artist’s hand gathers, arranges, and recombines. The camera captures atmosphere and surface while drawing from a lineage of composite image-making that reaches from the dada-ists who gave birth to photomontage. Through this process, Murphy constructs visual systems in which histories converge and new forms of seeing emerge.

 

Recurring motifs of boats, garments, birds and botanical structures, though a syntax of poetics, remain grounded in the physical world. The boat emerges as a structure of passage; the garment, as a container for memory; the bird, as an emissary of movement and return. At the center of the exhibition is Indigo Voyage (2016), a suspended kayak sheathed in indigo-dyed Japanese boro cloth. This convergence of Arctic vessel and layered textile form evokes shared technologies of endurance, charted through parallel histories.

 

Murphy’s work is a devotion to curiosity—an artist’s impulse that mirrors the fundamental human drive to understand, to gather, to piece together what remains. His interest in history honors collective memory and individual inheritance. The past appears as residue and fragment; woven into every surface, embedded in every form. Murphy approached this material with humility and precision, building visual systems that illuminate our evolving relationship with the unknown.

 

Voyager presents a world in which nature speaks, and where image making becomes an act of listening. The exhibition affirms Murphy’s belief in the simultaneous vastness and intimacy of existence. We are reminded that to mythologize nature is not to fabricate it—but to perceive it with unequivocal truth.