Date of Submission

Spring 2020

Academic Program

Studio Arts

Project Advisor 1

Laura Battle

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Boulevard of Broken Dreams

What starts in chaos ends in chaos

Finding the perfect magic

Thank you heros

Victory Garden

Social Suicide

Interview with a Vampire

Living in a fantasy world

I feel it coming

Angel from my nightmare

Life as a button

Angels gather here

Lone star

Superflystress

You have to properly release her to let her go…

I wanna be sedated

Flip your lid

(part of my collection of common phrases, song lyrics, parts of conversation, quotations from tv shows and movies, etc..)

Most of the media that I consume is media that I honestly hate or is in some way oppositional to my core values like The Bachelor or the lyrics from pop songs, but they also inspire a lot of my work. What am I doing when I make work based off of these things that have entertained me in an unexplainable or “guilty pleasure” type way? Humans in popular culture or humans in unpopular culture. What is most common to love? What are common charms to have on a charm bracelet? What are common meals to eat? What TV show is everyone watching? What are song lyrics that are recognizable and that I genuinely love as Julia and not through a filter of “guilty pleasure” or irony?

My practice is constant because it has so much to do with what I consume every day whether it be my media intake, conversations I am having or the food that I am eating. Everything enters an archive, and then becomes part of a collection. My focus has shifted from going through obsessive phases that are arbitrary like an obsession with shells or horses, and has come to focus more on humans in the popular culture of my life. And I have developed what is maybe an alter ego...By consuming the performances that surround me in media and in life and recycling these materials and ideas in my pieces, I have been creating a person who is a little bit outside of myself.

I want to make things that are contradictions. Something that looks like a nightmare and a dream at the same, maybe a joyful nightmare. Some contradictions that I like are “guilty pleasure,” “Estrogen Motorcycle,”“Angel From My Nightmare,” and “being afraid of what you love.” Obviously these are word contradictions, but why can’t something be just surfacely, visually a contradiction. This can be achieved by consuming physical materials in the same way that I have re-consumed everything else...a lot of my work is created entirely from materials from the dump or the free pile or a thrift store. “You have to properly release her to let her go…” is composed of thrifted jeans, ribbons, a toy shield and a huge stuffed horse from the dump. These items were a part of my collection before they became a part of this piece. Childhood toys and ribbons and bows meant to wrap presents are woven into a sprawling tapestry.

My book project deviates from the rest in terms of materials, but is a direct reflection of my conceptual process. It involved rereading 9 different books that I read as a middle schooler; Nancy Drew, The Fab Five, The Pixie Hollow series and others, all including disagreeable coded messages about gender roles. I then composed new stories of selected quotations from each of them and inserted my own name and other names such as Harry Styles, Steph Curry and The Bachelor into the text. Each page is 3ftx4ft in size and were to be placed in a grid on the wall. In order to make this piece, I had to consume again, and then spin something very large out of something that has become very small and in many ways contradictory to my values.

I want people to see the references in my work whether they are relatable and accessible tropes like horses, butterflies, skulls, flowers, shells, or quotations from famous songs or tv shows or phrases that people use all of the time or a tattoo that a lot of people would get. This is generous because these things are familiar, ordinary, and low-rent (having little prestige; inferior or shoddy). These tropes create a lens that is campy, unprecious and juvenile. I am interested in how something so boiled down and meaningless, like three words taken from a song, an abandoned stuffed horse, or a single hot dog charm could be spun or woven into something giant. The ideas that it once contained, if any, can re-enter the world in a more palatable and understood form but also a form that critiques it’s original intentions or misintentions and becomes a strange and intoxicating challenge visually; the challenge is scale, multiplicity, and decoding the cliches.

(collection continued…)

Pippin the musical is named after me

The sum of her parts

Kiss of Death

Big Evil Grin

Was it something I said?

Unburden your soul

The only thing I can’t have is dairy

The cult of personality

The princess of darkness has spoken

Too hot to handle

Love letter to the Earth

A tattoo that a lot of people would get

Afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted

Save your tears

If you can talk about your work, you are probably not making the right work

Re-fucking Tweet

Funny Business

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