'Digital Play: Wendy McMurdo Collected Works 1995–2012' Mid-career retrospective Solo exhibition Jun-Aug 2014

‘Digital Play: Wendy McMurdo Collected Works 1995 – 2012’ was a mid-career solo retrospective exhibition which included both photography, moving image and related publications produced from 1995-2012. This comprehensive exhibition (the exhibit included 20 large scale photographic works and one film installation) opened with digital and photographic works produced in the mid-90s through to cutting edge digital film produced in 2009. ‘Digital Play: Wendy McMurdo Collected Works 1995 – 2012’ was curated and produced as part of Generation: 25 years of Contemporary Art in Scotland which was a nationwide initiative ‘inspired by the energy and vision of the artists who have lived and worked in Scotland over the last twenty-five years.’ https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/features/generation-25-years-contemporary-art-scotland
 
The exhibition coincided with the completion of a PhD by publication at University of Westminster entitled Wendy McMurdo: Collected Works (1195-2014.) This text is available in pdf form University of Westminster’s Research Repository here: https://bit.ly/39eLSuU.

In both the solo exhibition and the PhD text, I focused on my photographic and film work that takes the relationship between children and computers as its theme. Both the exhibition and the commentary opened therefore with a description of my earliest digital research project (In a Shaded Place 1995), through to a discussion on a series of projects that focus similarly on the relationship between children and digital culture from 1995 through to 2014. All of the projects included in Digital Play address the question: How has the computer (and, by extension, the information age) affected the ways in which we describe and depict ourselves? Over the period covered by the exhibition there has an unprecedented shift in the understanding of the role and function of photography. There has also been a marked shift in attitude to the representation of the child in society. Both of these subjects have deeply informed my practice.

• http://www.artinscotland.tv/2014/wendy-m...