In a Town by the Forest on the Shore: Puppet Pieces by Murphi Cook

In a Town by the Forest on the Shore, 9/1/17

In 1998, obscure filmmaker Urmo Hipock met with a small gathering of fans at the Savannah College of Art and Design to announce his newest project. The Clown was Stung by Wasps quickly became the stuff of legend, and when Hipock died in a tragic barn fire in 2015, it was assumed the unseen film was lost with him. Through a series of hidden keys and alleyway meetings, local nobody Murphi Cook has uncovered a series of artifacts from Hipock’s final masterpiece. The show also includes a sizable hand puppet collection and an illustrated lecture performed hourly

The works or artifacts featured in this show will also be used in her latest touring puppet theater show that will travel t headed to San Antonio and Austin with a Pittsburgh date TBD (looking at summer '18). The final form of this work is an outdoor show with a rotating platform, a real car, a projected drive-in video (with Cook herself in the projection booth, audio transmitted over fm frequencies, and a cast of high-school students! Or as Cook puts it, "an impossible play." This sneak peek at what Cook has been up to includes dozens of puppets, a video, writings, and props. Basically, the gallery is going to be packed with the fun, surreal products of Cook's wild imagination.

In 1990, Murphi sat in the backseat of her parent's Toyota Corolla with a burnt cupcake in one hand and a preschool diploma in the other; her life had peaked just five minutes prior. Because of this (or perhaps, in spite of this), her art weaves whimsy, horror, disappointment, and memory into fast-moving multimedia theatre spectacles and immersive environments. Using simple mechanics, puppetry, live-projection, and non-linear storytelling, she dumps spectators into parallel universes that revel in the potential for magic. Murphi holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from Carnegie Mellon, and has spent the last five years traveling the country as part of the rag tag puppetry duo Miniature Curiosa.