“for you, no wound”
A Solo Exhibition by Julia McGehean
Julia McGehean’s first solo exhibition, “for you, no wound.)”, explores the subjective stakes of the mundane that led literary theorist Roland Barthes to untangle the universal mechanics of the archive. In his seminal novel, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Barthes defines punctum as the profound details that pierce through an individual observer, while others remain unharmed by the significance. Throughout the gallery, McGehean installs a series of paper paintings and floral arrangements based on the description of the photograph where Barthes first encountered this unilateral phenomenon.
In response to Barthes’ rhetorical maneuver to withhold the portrait of his late mother from publication, McGehean’s work considers how language is an imperfect proxy for communication. Though Barthes alludes the picture is set in a solarium, McGehean takes the title literally—reverse-engineering Winter Garden Photograph into a surreal environment where flowers bloom and instantly freeze in sub-zero temperatures. This misinterpretation results in a paracosmic landscape where private and public mourning intertwine.
Over time, McGehean has developed an abstract alphabet by synthesizing various brands of brick-building roses into a unified system she combines with school supplies and other communication based objects. In contrast to the fluidity of oil paint, this modular approach transforms language into flexible forms with intuitive manual grammar. This incremental process allows the artist's body to serve as a reference point within a standard set, anchoring each composition around her five-foot frame. In Death of the Future, a 12 x 48 inch oil painting of a cloudy sky, McGehean locates herself within the constrained proportions of continuous computer paper—beginning with an affixed pencil sharpener at the knee and embedding key anatomical landmarks up the floral stem, from her pubic bone to her ribcage and mouth.
Just as Barthes’ Winter Garden Photograph remains unseen, its absence shapes the emotional weight of Camera Lucida. McGehean’s fragmented figures are simultaneously there and not there, evoking a similar sense of loss as they hover between construction and collapse. These spectral forms accumulate, transforming the gallery into a cemetery within the Uncanny Valley, where memory falters and language takes on a silent physicality. Like Barthes’ ghost image, they do not reveal; instead, they haunt, lingering as eerie elegies to the inarticulable.
Julia McGehean is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator from Philadelphia, currently living and working in Boston, MA. She received her MFA in painting from Boston University in 2024, after earning her BFA in Sculpture and Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2018. She has been working in libraries, archives, and museums for a decade, and is a Teaching Assistant at Harvard University in their painting department. In 2021, she was a Pink Noise Projects Artist In Residence in Philadelphia, PA, and continues to show around the city, including at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Alumni Gallery, Automat Collective, Works on Paper Gallery, and Esther Klein Gallery, among others. Additionally, her work has been included in shows at the Lancaster Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, Volkswagen Headquarters Virginia,, Gallery 263 in Massachusetts, Morgan Lehman Gallery and Pocket Utopia in New York City. Her first solo show will be on view at Piano Craft Gallery in Boston, MA through February of 2025.
The human brain is not inherently hardwired to read or write; instead, modern text recognition is a gradual reconfiguration of pre-existing visual processing skills. As literacy emerges as a contentious currency of our time, I am drawn to the complexities of the observable alphabet and the implications of its invention. My work encodes a neurodivergent history of literacy into multimodal paintings and sculptures that reference spell check, instruction manuals, standardized measurements, and the physical language of sports. Guided by synchronicities and a tangential rolodex of research topics, my studio practice is a synthesis of ir/rational thought.
Rendered to scale with crisp layers of acrylic gesso on narrow wood panels, my low-relief paintings mimic extended sheets of dot matrix paper. I disrupt the surface tension of these compartmentalized shapes in relation to sequence and syntax; imprinting each blank page with objects and oil paint informed through a perverse index of pressure, punctuation, and penetration. My interest in impressions spans many definitions of movement and (mis)translation, including the performative nature of trompe-l’œil and the impact of action painting. Despite their inert properties, I contend with each segment as a dynamic opponent in the studio, reminiscent of my own experiences with labored learning.
Through an amalgamation of published imagery and everyday office supplies, I engage with found objects as tangible studies of the writing process. My collection functions as a modular dictionary in which distinct definitions are exchanged for familiar forms. As an artist, I am also an editor: I add, subtract, and rearrange visual components until they formally and pragmatically converge as one. Whether assembled laterally on pedestals or vertically in panel, these working documents consider the interplay between objects and words, as well as objects as words.
