It was during a scheduled “Salon Night” that I initially encountered the intricacies of her installation work. Julie had invited us into her bedroom, where we entered a galaxy of her own creation—an installation of found objects and materials that spread across one wall of the room, and spilled onto the mirror, the floor, the chair, the cupboard, the window. Lengths of string pulled taut; tape running along the skirting; a black tube curled into a ring; circular paper cutouts echoing a precariously balanced coin; multicolored rubber bands hanging off a hook; a globe next to a cone of yarn near a small clock. Amidst these surprising constellations, adhesive lettering spelled out phrases such as “TWO-BODY ORBITING SYSTEM”, “THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF THE MOON”, and “COLLISION WITH A COMET”. It was, in both form and text, something approaching the cosmic.
The phrases, Julie told us, were lifted from a book called Astronomy Explained, which she had found on a bookshelf at Arteles. These otherwise dry words—section headings from a textbook—became evocative poetry within this strange new environment she had constructed for them. As we gathered in her bedroom, her private space for the month, Julie read her own writing aloud. What she narrated was intensely introspective, almost a diary, her vulnerabilities laid bare. It was an act of generosity.
I found the experience profoundly affecting. The objects, the words, her words—I felt myself wishing I could stay with them for a long time, much longer than the ten minutes that we spent in her room. I wished more people could have had that experience. This interview is my way of fulfilling both of those wishes. Here, Julie speaks openly about the myriad threads that run through her interdisciplinary practice, as well as the languages, objects, and emotions that underpin and surface in her works.
—Berny Tan
You describe your practice as “inspired by the tools of desire,” which you define as “the things we turn to when something is desperately wanted but cannot be achieved through hard work or other rational means.” Could you talk a bit more about this concept, and why it is so alluring to you as an artist?This thread, which has shaped my work for the past several years, originated in a visit to an ancient medicine wheel in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, USA. A medicine wheel is a traditional site of healing, and this particular site has been in continuous use as a sacred place by Native American peoples for over six thousand years. It features a traditional stone circle set in the landscape, at three thousand meters in elevation overlooking the valley below. While the stones themselves are ancient, in modern times a low courtesy fence has been constructed around the circle, not as a barricade but rather as a reminder that something sacred exists in its center. On my visit, I was most struck by the offerings that have been tied to that fence (trinkets and items of presumed personal significance), but most of all by long strings of small cloth bundles that have been wrapped around the fence again and again until each line of bundles forms its own mass. The stone circle is entirely surrounded by these colorful offerings.
Through later research I learned that these are traditional prayer bundles, made by placing tobacco, a sacred plant, in small scraps of fabric, which are then tied methodically and mindfully to one long string. Each individual bundle is made as a prayer or plea, so by inference, the length of the string of bundles communicates the intensity of its maker’s request. This is the aspect that struck me most: the depth of need made visible.
I created a work in response to that visit, titled Love Medicine, which I made by tying my own prayer bundles to a wire bedspring. My prayer bundles were made carefully, following traditional guidelines for both construction and reverence. Each piece tied to the structure is a request from my own hope and want and desire and need, though visually, I am interested in having them suggest the same thing that I found at the medicine wheel: visual evidence of another’s—or multiple others’—desire and longing. The bedspring is a metaphorically loaded object: it suggests comfort, and security, and domesticity, and romantic or sexual love, or the lack or loss or denial of any of these. I suspect that many of the offerings I encountered at the Bighorn Medicine Wheel are similarly rooted in love.
Art-making has often been intertwined or conflated with shamanic activity, and my works over the ensuing several years became a means of trying to alter circumstances over which I had no physical means of control. These works variously attempt to alter circumstance through prayer, intention, hope, problem-solving, or simply by trusting that the extent of the need will cause the cosmos to shift. While initially my interest was self-motivated in this way, I have since shifted toward an interest in the optimistic power of desire—the way that love and longing and heartache keep us going and motivate us and even when at their most crushing, make us want to live.
Your work often utilizes words, phrases, and sentences that are disembodied from their original sources (such as textbooks), which lifts them out of their relatively sterile origins into an evocative state of metaphor and poetry. How and why did you come to use this approach?
I pull words from a variety of sources, including those that come to me as if by osmosis; some I cull from existing texts and others I write myself. I’m interested in what words do or evoke when removed from their contexts or narratives, and the potency that the simplest words or phrases acquire when paired with other words, environments, and materials. In essence, I’m interested in the malleability of language, and also in its generative power. Words do not only communicate, they also evoke, and I’m interested in this space between intent and auspice. We all talk about communication breakdowns, where one person or entity’s words are misunderstood or misinterpreted by another. But the opposite also happens—where straightforward, clear, communicative words can introduce new possibilities that have nothing to do with their speaker’s intent.
This is my interest in the seemingly benign phrases pulled from textbooks and the like. I think of my work as building relationships between language fragments that have not yet met one another. A couple of examples from a current work-in-progress that do just this—the two parts of each phrase come from two different passages of a textbook, such that the words don’t address the subject of the textbook at all:
A LITTLE SALT SPRINKLED IN THE FLAME // INTENSIFIES THE DARKENING
TWO VELOCITIES CAN BE ADDED VECTORIALLY // THERE IS NO MYSTERY ABOUT THIS
Conversely, in your recent solo exhibition Battlefields, you included a line not from a textbook or academic source, but from Frank Stanford's 15,283-line epic poem, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You: THERE ARE SO MANY REVOLUTIONS LIGHT YEARS AWAY. Why did this particular line speak to you, and what are your thoughts on weaving the words of another writer into your work?
This was the first time I’d used an intact passage written by someone else, and I wrestled with that quite a bit before deciding to proceed—right up through install. I brought the vinyl text with me to the gallery still unsure how I felt about using another writer’s words, and had a conversation with the gallery director about it onsite. Ultimately, I decided to use it as a visual or formal element—a dark band near the floor as much as anything, though, of course, the words set the tone for the entire show.
The only other text found in this exhibit was in a work called Heartbreak, which is made up of 650 geographic place names arranged in a justified block. It is a list of battle sites, emphasizing literal battlegrounds but spanning battles of the ancient world, political struggles for individual and human rights, cities of recent police brutalities, and places synonymous with cultural or environmental catastrophe. This work, and the Battlefields exhibit on the whole, foreground the ubiquity of political or social struggle against the persistence of individual and interpersonal love, loss, and joy throughout time. In essence, it is a realization that anyone who has ever fallen in love has done so against a backdrop of unspeakable hardships happening somewhere on the globe.
Frank Stanford’s poem, from which I also derived the exhibit’s title, is about struggles for social and racial justice in the 1960s American South. His line, “there are so many revolutions light years away,” motivated my thinking for much of the work in this exhibit. There is so much we want to achieve, against so much bleakness. Somehow the world remains beautiful, because we fall in love and we allow our hearts to break and we keep on going. “Light years” is impossibly far, but it also gives us so much time, and in that regard, it stays optimistic.
Your installations often integrate found objects and materials alongside drawings, prints, and photographs. While at our residency, I asked you about the self-adhesive vinyl letters that you use to incorporate text into your work, and you described them as generic office supplies. These are all things we might otherwise consider to be mundane, but which become charged with meaning when put in new permutations. What is it that draws you to “the ordinary” as a medium?
I began my artistic career as a ceramic artist, and my M.F.A. study was in ceramics. My work was sculptural, and I used clay to replicate other materials and objects: clothes hangers, cakes, fur, cloth, etc. Shortly after beginning my M.F.A. program, I began to see that recreating these other materials in clay added a layer of meaning that was not serving the work—clay introduced fragility, and a degree of remove from the actual object itself that only diluted its potency. I also became really interested in removing evidence of the maker’s hand. At that time, I was creating objects that suggested social rules for behavior, and it was important that these objects be believable as things that already exist in the world, and not as the more easily dismissed products of an eccentric individual maker. I developed a facility for manipulating ordinary materials to make them appear as if they had been manufactured in that way, which is a technique I still put to use occasionally: a work from a couple of years ago conjoins two red plastic fuel cans—one large and one small—such that they share one pour spout, which entangles both. The work looks simple and manufactured, though in actuality it relied upon a complicated assortment of dishwasher hoses and gaskets and generally invisible problem-solving.
As I stepped away from clay and began using other materials directly, I became really careful about what associations a given material already carries. Sandpaper is an example I often use to describe this: we know from looking and from past experience that sandpaper is abrasive and rough to the touch and will erode other materials. When we see sandpaper, we are subtly aware of all that, in the background, without paying it any particular mind. Any work that uses sandpaper will then also carry that subtle sense of being abrasive. “The ordinary” or mundane materials feel most potent to me in this regard, as they are easiest to tease apart for metaphor and associative information.
In the case of the adhesive lettering: when working with text, I am similarly careful about what the physical text suggests, beyond the meaning of the words. When I want the words I use to feel specific to one individual or to idiosyncratic experience, I use handwriting. When I want words to feel clinical or codified, I use a vinyl cutter to make them precise and even. I favor the individual adhesive letters from office supply stores because they exist in between: they present themselves as being important or official, but it is clear that they have been set individually by a human hand as the spacing and position are always a little wonky.
The sky and the cosmos have always been prominent themes in your practice. At our residency, you created a body of work that was inspired by a textbook you found on the bookshelf at Arteles, entitled Astronomy Explained, pairing text from the book with objects and drawings that were all planetary or cosmic in their own way. Why is the cosmos so fascinating to you, and what do you hope to represent or understand about it through your art?
The cosmos is where we look for and reliably find mystery, beyond both science and religion. I was drawn in particular to the title of that book: Astronomy Explained. It is so authoritative, for a subject so vast and uncharted. The book is from the 1970s, meaning it likely contains many omissions and inaccuracies, given new pieces of information that have been added to our paltry collective knowledge of space in the decades since.
I’m drawn to the cosmos explicitly because it is unknown and possibly unknowable, and in that regard holds potential. In the act of wishing on a star, or asking the moon to communicate across long distances, or even praying to a god up above, we acknowledge this mystery and potential, and the chance that even if the laws of physics or social convention are not working in our favor, something else might be. I’m increasingly interested in astrology—I’m not a skeptic exactly, but I believe in it even while also being aware of the absurdity of it. I like choosing the rational and the magical, all at once. The cosmos represents both.
Another thread that runs through your practice is the transformation of major events of Western history into motifs to explore human emotion. In Battlefields again, you used imagery of physical battle sites such as Gettysburg and the beaches of Normandy, while you also have an ongoing series entitled Marie Antoinette in America, which imagines that Marie Antoinette has escaped the French Revolution and settled in the American West. How would you characterize your navigation and appropriation of these histories in your work?
When I began working with the Marie Antoinette character, I started off researching her actual life and circumstances, but quickly realized that I’m more interested in the way her legacy has been maintained in the popular imagination. I’m interested in what the non-historian knows about her generally, without doing any research. There’s “Let them eat cake,” which is commonly attributed to Marie Antoinette though there is no record of her ever saying it, or the swing for having sex with horses that everyone seems to have heard about Catherine the Great, which people sometimes mix up and attribute to Marie Antoinette. These seem to suggest that all we need to know about these women from history is that they said vapid things and engaged in lewd behavior. The performance-based work I did with the Marie Antoinette character saw her trying to survive in a harsh landscape with only the skills attributed to her by history—namely, her sexuality, and her willful ignorance of what is happening around her.
The more recent work with Gettysburg and other battle sites operates in a similar way; there is a rich, in-depth history of the Battle of Gettysburg that history buffs eagerly pursue in great detail, but there is also just an iconography associated with the name “Gettysburg.” The name alone is a stand-in for the motivations and fallouts of the U.S. Civil War, in the same way that “Normandy” conjures beach invasions of World War II. I’m using these place names to conjure a shared emotion, through what we know of a place in the most general terms.
During our residency, you read out a very personal piece of writing to accompany an installation you created in your bedroom. You mentioned that it was one of the first times that you'd experimented with that form of presentation within your practice. Nonetheless, there is a deep emotional undercurrent to your work, even if the details of that are not fully comprehensible to the viewer. How do your personal experiences inform the works that you create?
My work generally carries a certain intimacy that I don’t try to hide, and I think my best work is always the most personal. This often surprises me: things that come so directly from highly individual emotions will prove to be the most connective with audiences. I suspect it is because the emotion isn’t disguised, and even though our emotions feel so peculiar and isolating to us as individuals, it turns out others can recognize them when they see them.
The artworks that I love best, made by others, are the works that allow me to encounter a flood of emotion that is not entirely my own. My first experience of weeping over an artwork was with Cy Twombly’s Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor, at the Menil Collection’s Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston. I’ve been back to visit that work several times, and the same flood of emotion always comes back. Clearly, the emotions I encounter in response to that work are my own, but the artwork gives the emotions space to recognize themselves. I think when we work from the depths of our most personal experiences, we find that others encounter our works from the depths of theirs, and these are connective moments.
In the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, like most of the artists I know, I went through a time of really questioning what my work is about, and whether or not I could make such individual work in a time that so fully demands collective action. For the time being, I have decided that the connectivity I just described gives social relevance to highly personal work. Even within the most disparate of populations and circumstances, our overriding desires are universal: love that is deep and lasting, comfort, and the need to feel seen and heard—especially by one’s beloved. We recognize these things across other hardships.
Up till the first half of 2019, you were running China Hutch Projects, a space for contemporary art situated in the dining room of a rented 1940s bungalow in Chestertown, Maryland. The works you featured responded in some way to the conditions of the domestic space. What was the inspiration for this project, and how did you view it in relation to your own artistic practice? Do you have plans to continue this project in the future?
In 2016, I moved across the country alone for a teaching position, and knew no one in my new location. I rented a small house that had a formal dining room, and I don’t do a lot of formal dining. I had envisioned beginning some sort of gallery or curatorial space for a number of years, and the extra space of the dining room offered me the opportunity to do so. A number of artists in cities around the world were opening “apartment galleries” as a means of separating art presentation from the art market, among other reasons. Inspired by that model, I did the same thing in my small town.
Initially, I envisioned it as a space that I would curate, but quickly decided that I would rather identify artists whose work I admire and give them carte blanche to do whatever they wanted in the space—to experiment in a low-stakes environment that offered an unusual visual context for their work and photographed beautifully. Because I was essentially asking artists I didn’t know to show in my dining room, I made it a priority to offer artists quality documentation, an opening, publicity, and a professional website for the space that they could refer back to in their own professional materials. The space itself was visibly domestic and contextually dense: it had a bay window, wainscoting around the walls, a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and a built-in hutch in the corner of the room, for which the space was named. I had a lot of fun playing with the dual nature of the space, borrowing certain conventions or conceits of the “white cube” gallery, such as the artist’s name and exhibition title on the wall in vinyl lettering, and pairing these with the decidedly homey. Every opening had a cookie jar set amidst the more expected hummus and crudités. Kids who regularly came to openings knew to run straight for the cookie jar, and adults knew to run for beer in the fridge.
Having just moved to a new area, it also offered me a way of reaching out to other artists and getting to know their work, and of contributing to this community of artists as a newcomer. The interpersonal nature of installing their work in my home fostered some close friendships that have led to other things, including collaborations. I teach at a small college in walking distance of that house, and it also became a non-hierarchical gathering place where students, faculty from other departments, neighbors, and the local community were regularly in attendance for openings. People I only know from walking my dog would ask me about the work they could see through the front window. My next-door neighbor’s eight-year-old daughter watched an early-morning installation happen through the window from her kitchen table while she ate her breakfast cereal. I loved being able to offer that engagement with contemporary art in my small, relatively conventional community.
The nature of renting a home means eventually moving, and I ended the project—at least in that incarnation—because I needed to move. The project’s visibility had grown to an extent that the most recent openings started to make me nervous—I had ninety people through my house one evening. I’m not sure what the next venture will look like, but I absolutely will initiate something in this vein again in the future. I do believe that artists making things happen, and making opportunities for other artists, is a critical part of the way I want to engage with the world.
Finally, you have a few exhibitions coming up in the next few months. Could you talk about what you have planned for these exhibitions?
I’m currently working toward three overlapping exhibitions scheduled for the spring, which means I’ll need separate bodies of work for each. In my practice right now, I’m thinking about strategies for emotional survival, and each of these exhibits will invoke a nuanced aspect of this theme. One exhibit is titled 100 Year Flood, which is the name given to the “recurrence interval” of an extreme but statistically predictable event. I’m using that title to refer to a surge of emotional intensity that is not without precedent, but threatens to overwhelm survival. Another exhibit, titled Split Void, is structured around a question: can loneliness or longing be divided in two and shared, or is it merely doubled? I am nearly always working on several things at once, and the third exhibit will grow out of one of these other current explorations; I have a number of possible directions still taking form from out of the mist.
