tenderly cradled and lavishly flung
July 7–August 11, 2018
Visitor Welcome Center
Los Angeles
PRESS RELEASE
PRESS: Art + Cake
PRESS: Two Coats of Paint
PRESS: LA Weekly
from the press release:
Tragedy transforms the quotidian into a quest for meaning making; ordinary things once belonging to someone irradiate into coveted and sacred assets. Life’s trajectory is no longer linear, and passage through time becomes a scatter of moments: nurturing fascinations with butterflies and milkweed, catching ghost cats in the corner of the eye, valiantly elongating time through foolhardy and repetitive tasks. Fooled by flutters of hope dancing too close to the edge, what was, swallowed whole, lives in the rib cage of grief.
Julia Schwartz’s paintings on repurposed and recovered surfaces are an attempt to shift away from painful remembrance into a monument of play. Images of cats, girls, and dots decorate the surfaces of various objects; they evoke adolescent tenderness. Things live on in the reliquary, and it’s messy. They build on top of one another and grow to become larger than life: a construction and a site through which the dream of the now is realized. Through her work, Schwartz endeavors to make sense of the perpetual fragmentation of grief by insisting on the permanence of the hopeful light of what is.
tenderly cradled and lavishly flung, Julia Schwartz, Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles, 2020. (installation view)
tenderly cradled and lavishly flung, Julia Schwartz, Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles, 2020. Installation view.
continuous web, Julia Schwartz, 2017-2018. Gouache on Magic the Gathering cards on gallery wall shown with (from left to right): smoke glass mirror, 2017, broken bong, stickers, beads, copper wire, linen gouache, tape on masonite panel, 10 x1 0 inches; double E, 2015, gouache on yupo paper in found frame 11 x 11.5 inches; vessels, handmade paper wrapped around reclaimed bottles, beads, sizes variable 2018; angry cat on saturday morning, 2018, mixed media on found frame, 12 x 10 inches; ghost cat, 2017 gouache on polyester, 14 x 12.5 inches. Installation view.
relic from your dance days, Julia Schwartz, 2017. Acrylic on found object, 12 x 6 inches.
butterflies, Julia Schwartz, 2018. Mixed media (destroyed canvases), size variable.
another earth, Julia Schwartz, 2016-17. Mixed media on unstretched dropcloth (acrylic, oilstick, tape, beads, fabric, washcloth, copper wire), 98 x 100. Installation view.
another earth, Julia Schwartz, 2016-17. Mixed media on unstretched dropcloth (acrylic, oilstick, tape, beads, fabric, washcloth, copper wire), 98 x 100. Detail.
another earth, Julia Schwartz, 2016-17. Mixed media on unstretched dropcloth (acrylic, oilstick, tape, beads, fabric, washcloth, copper wire), 98 x 100. Detail.
continuous web, Julia Schwartz, 2017-2018. Gouache on Magic the Gathering cards on gallery wall shown with (from left to right): smoke glass mirror, 2017, broken bong, stickers, beads, copper wire, linen gouache, tape on masonite panel, 10 x1 0 inches; vessels, handmade paper wrapped around reclaimed bottles, beads, sizes variable 2018. Detail.