Exhibition from January 29 to February 28, 2026
Ethan Murrow’s Rescue Vehicles are gloriously absurd. A sailboat on wheels, piled high with musical instruments, races across the American West, trailing a plume of dust. A lone figure rides a moose along an alpine ridge, reaching for the string of a drifting weather balloon as if it might lift them both into the skies. These are images that make you smile — at their whimsy, their impossible physics, their joyful refusal to make sense.
Beneath the humor, however, lies a sense of urgency. Murrow’s rescue vehicles are absurd because they mirror our own predicament. We face vast, complex crises with tools that feel laughably insufficient, so we improvise, collaborate, and make do with whatever we have. The artist speaks of the widespread anxiety surrounding threats to the visual arts, research, and science – “the things that keep us healthy and happy in our daily lives.” From that shared concern comes his clear-eyed observation, “We’re headed for the cliff, but we’re also still striving, being inventive and frankly stubborn.” His Rescue Vehicles are improvised responses to these difficult circumstances, full of faith in human ingenuity. They ask, quite literally, how we might survive and what, in the end, is worth saving.
In Rescue Vehicles, rescue is always a physical feat, an act of strength, balance, and agility, sustained on the brink of failure. A cetologist braces against choppy waters to hold on to a whale; apiculturists steer a small craft in stormy waters to protect their cargo of endangered bees; a morphologist leaps midair, clutching a container of delicate flowers; bibliopegists, precariously poised on an uneven rock, bend to support a massive printing press. Through these improbable rescues, Murrow envisions the salvaging of all that sustains us: the natural world, the cultures we build, and the inventions – both makeshift and glorious — that embody our drive to seek freedom and stability.
Across this series, Murrow’s world is never still. Balloons strain against their strings, sails billow in the wind, clouds build into dark towers. These images of air and motion — of things lifted, carried, and propelled – embody what he calls his obsession with, “the kinetic energy driving things forward.” The weather balloons, inspired by those used by climate scientists, have become for him a “mini metaphor for action,” a way to imagine direction and levitation in uncertain times. The wheels and propellers in his vehicles share this same logic of propulsion: simple, almost archaic devices that transform wind and motion into forward movement. Together, these emblems of flight and force capture the fragile optimism at the heart of Rescue Vehicles: the belief that even the smallest current can carry us somewhere new.
The physical intensity of these scenes grew directly from Murrow’s process. To understand how rescue might look and feel, he began not with pencil and paper but with people in motion. He worked with Urbanity Dance, a Boston company he has long collaborated with, directing dancers through imaginary rescue scenarios and photographing their physical efforts. With prompts like “imagine you are saving books from destruction,” he gave the dancers utilitarian clothing and whimsical props, then let them find their own way through each impossible task. By working with movement professionals, Murrow captures the full physical reality of rescue: the bursts of energy, the trembling endurance, the small, constant adjustments it takes to keep from falling.
Working with dancers prompted Murrow to reflect on the physical intelligence of making and on the collective forms of labor that rely on people moving in concert. He has titled each scene after a maker or specialist, a shift from the solitary figures of his earlier self-portraits to communities of builders and thinkers. “I wanted it to be about a collective populace working toward something,” he explains. In his drawing Barnraising, Murrow turns a quintessentially communal endeavor, the traditional American barn raising, into an act that is at once heroic and quixotic. Three figures – depicted in a composition recalling Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of marines hoisting the American flag on Iwo Jima – heave bales of hay that teeter on a rocky outcrop above a sublime mountainous landscape. Growing up on a farm taught Murrow to see laborers and craftspeople as everyday heroes, confronting difficult problems with resilience and resourcefulness. For him, dance and craft are closely connected: both are practices grounded in embodied knowledge and repeated gesture. In the dancer’s precise movement, Murrow recognizes the same patient skill that guides a luthier or a gardener: the same dedication to hard work and the same capacity to turn effort into a tour de force.
Murrow’s dialogue with art history blends the fantastical with the earnest. The landscape beneath the leaping morphologist draws from Swiss painter Alexandre Calame (1810–1864), whose fields and mountains always seem slightly askew. The small hat perched on her head comes from Bernat Martorell’s (1390–1452) Saint George and the Dragon of 1434–35 – a detail that, as Murrow notes, lends the dancer a faint air of authority, making her look official in her impossible task. The flowers she carries are inspired by the still lifes of Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), whom Murrow admires for her deep respect for the natural world – a reminder that behind all this motion lies a genuine reverence for what is being saved.
Ultimately, Rescue Vehicles honors the dogged persistence of human effort. Murrow’s figures celebrate the real people who preserve our knowledge, culture, and fragile ecosystems not because they are certain of success but because the work must continue. They move forward out of necessity, improvising with whatever means remain. Murrow finds dignity in that obstinacy, in the way we keep inventing and trying even when the outcome is unclear. However absurd their devices, his rescuers move with conviction, sustained by the hope that motion itself, however faltering, might be enough to carry something precious through the storm.
— Leanne Sacramone
