Spellerberg Projects

Zora J Murff and Rana Young, Fade Like a Sigh

Exhibition • Oct 1–30, 2021

Opening Reception Friday, October 1, 6–9pm.
For gallery hours and visit info, click here.
Image list (PDF)

Curated/produced by Michael Villarreal


ICOSA Collective and Spellerberg Projects are pleased to announce Fade Like a Sigh by Zora J Murff and Rana Young at Spellerberg Projects Main St. Gallery in Lockhart, TX.

Conversation often begins with a question much in the same way art-making does. Words possess the potential to better know one another; the visual possesses knowledge to understand constructs both abstract and concrete, past and present. Each endeavor is a call in search of a response, but the response from the visual becomes more obscure as what we see creates a gap between what we do know and what we think we know.

Together, Zora J Murff and Rana Young began mining their own family histories, exploring the void left by an absent parent. The images in Fade Like a Sigh reflects their dialogues of this shared experience. Using their personal small collections of family photographs and reinterpreting them through their own contemporary imagery, Murff and Young highlight the complicated relationship between photographic record and the fragmented and abstract nature of memory. This collaboration began in 2017 and is ongoing.

About the Artists

Zora J Murff and Rana Young are artists and educators based in Fayetteville, AR; both earned their MFA in Studio Art at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Their work has been written about for Hyperallergic and British Journal of Photography, featured by Huffington Post, and published in-print with LensCulture and Gnomic Book. Exhibitions of their work have been hosted by Glass Gallery (University of Georgia), Brick City East Gallery (Missouri State University), and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Art (Nebraska City, NE). Their curatorial proposal, Take it from Here, featuring artworks by ten emerging photographers who use the camera as a multifaceted site of imagination, play, and self-exploration, was awarded an exhibition at Filter Space (Chicago, IL) in 2021. Currently, Murff and Young teach in the School of Art at the University of Arkansas.


Presented in collaboration with the ICOSA Collective as part of our Fall 2021 partnership.

ICOSA