Previous Shows: 2012: ALLTOGETHERNOW: Julie Alexander

My paintings and drawings are straight forward material layerings. They are horizontal and vertical lines, scrubbings and movements. My process is full of intention – I apply, I scrape and erase, I make a statement and negate it. 

We tell ourselves stories all the time. Paintings and drawings are one of the ways we tell those stories. The surface of the canvas is the location where we compress, layer, negate, retell and seek to understand our stories. It is our theoretical Babel. The sides of the canvas are the transition to real space, to the wall and the room where you stand. 

A seminal image for me, buried in my childhood, is one that never existed. It contains a weathered fence, a fence post, unkempt grasses, dankness, discarded and rusted bits of past ideas but also sunshine and wild freshness. There is so much for me in that image ranging from the personal to the political: my tendency to solitude, my need to connect to a landscape, a distrust of suburbia as a way to organize ourselves, a desire to bridge the constructed gap between humans and nature, excrement and Ajax. 

But I am a walking contradiction waiting for redemption – that sweet spot between two halves of a dichotomy where this is in conjunction with that. I am sparkling cannon fodder. I think about so much when I paint and I think about nothing at all. 

The edges are important and the middle is.