Murray Bowles: Sixteen Frames
Curators: Luke Turner and Justin Marsh
Axis gallery is pleased to present Murray Bowles’ Sixteen Frames, a selection of his photographic works that depict the energy filled spaces of this region’s underground music subculture. Renowned throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, Bowles is held in especially high regard by punk cognoscenti for his devoted photography actions and his generous distribution of prints. Bowles participated in thousands of gatherings, from the center of the floor, with his camera and flash held high, recording the people and interiors from the early 1980’s until his death in 2019. As his anarchic subjects move with abandon inside derelict buildings, their bodies and limbs flail beyond the confines of the camera viewfinder. The resulting images subvert common notions of pictorial order. Bowles’ compositions are immediate and dynamic, their formal qualities produced primarily by the photographer’s proximity to the chaos and his use of dedicated flash lighting.
