It satisfies our deepest needs while raising us to our highest sense of self. With the piano, Murray creates real time compositions. These improvisational explorations are inspired by ideas from the worlds of theoretical physics as well as mystical traditions. The music acts as metaphor for quantum phenomena such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. As an improvisation, there is a certain spontaneous probability in the music that one note will sound over another. This probabilistic construct creates an environment for balancing expectation with nostalgia, anticipation with sentiment, the probable with the unknown. The imagery shown in tandem with the music are all abstract photographs (without photoshop) taken of everyday common objects. The camera becomes the medium through which the mystery and beauty inherent in everyday things that we take for granted are revealed. In this sense, the work challenges the limitations that physical form imposes on perception. Material and form are dissolved and with it our assumptions, associations and imposed meanings dissolve too. In this way, light is used to penetrate the essential core of matter, and matter’s meaning to us. Imagine placing a leaf into a river with the strike of the first note of the piano. The music develops, the journey of the leaf takes off. And while, like the leaf, we perceive our lives to exist within this apparent flow of time, this image soon reveals time’s illusory nature. As the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty explained, that our sense of this temporal flow comes from “...our surreptitiously putting into the river a witness of its course.” Perhaps time is not what we think it is. Einstein said that, “the past, present and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones ”. Perhaps there is an opportunity to disappear time and, with that, our selves. MindTravel is an exploration into that possibility. The imagery is meant to be viewed as well as not viewed just as the music is meant to be listened to and not listened to.
