for you, no wound.
A Solo Exhibition by Julia McGehean
October 4-20, 2024
Opening Reception: October 4, 2024 6-8PM
Gallery Hours: Fridays 6-8PM, Saturdays 12-5PM, Sundays 12-5PM
Artist Bio:
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, VAE Gallery in North Carolina, Gallery 263 in Massachusetts, and Pocket Utopia in New York City. Her first solo show will be on view at Piano Craft Gallery in Boston, MA through October of 2024.
Artist Statement:
The human brain is not hardwired to read or write, yet we collectively confront this neurological enigma as a currency of modern time. My conceptual practice depicts the history of the observed alphabet, and the implications of its invention through drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography. My work encodes the invisible effects of dyslexia through text based tangents relating to spell check, mass produced measurements, body relative directions, instruction manuals, computer passwords, glass plate astronomical data, and the language of tennis.
In response to a recent breakthrough that transformed my ability to read with ease for the first time, I acknowledge the multiplicity of print and its potential to exclude, mislead, control, humiliate, record, remember, navigate, negotiate, educate, empower, collect, and fight back. The studio is a place where I grapple with didactic tendencies and question what it means to hold the privilege to consciously choose illegibility.
Through an amalgamation of published imagery and everyday office supplies, I engage with found objects as a tangible study of the writing process. My collection serves 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 shelves or vertically in drywall, these working documents consider the neurological interplay between objects and words and objects as words. Influenced by a perverse index of pressure, punctuation, and penetration, this interest in impressions span the many applications of the word, including the performative nature of impersonation through the mimicry of trompe-l'œil.
As my terminable body contends with the constructed wor(l)d, I examine the imposed acquisition of language through the overlapping presence of tracking in sports and literacy. Symbolic of the fundamental actions of running and reading, I use the deceptively simple sequence . . . left . . . right . . . left . . . right . . . as a recurring motif while unpacking the philosophical tensions between athletics and academia. My paintings serve as a visual record of the parts-to-whole paradox of labored learning, and the cumulative efforts that are inherently erased at the threshold of success. Despite their inert properties, these paintings are active opponents in the studio; relating the nagging endurance of failure and grief to running with a stone in my shoe.
