Julia Bland. If You Want To Be Free

About

Bland’s large-scale works incorporate painting and weaving, exploring the structures and patterns that combine disparate elements into a whole. Ropes, painted canvas, and fabrics woven by the artist are stitched together, forming boundaries that further bind the work – warp to weft, image to object. The surface is a visible record of Bland’s evolving and multi-faceted process.

Bland utilizes abstraction to negotiate the space between geometry, symbolism, and representation. Shapes emerge – an arrow, a shelter, a canyon, a figure – seemingly familiar, universal, and archaic. While the compositions incorporate structures that imply pure or timeless forms, color and materiality evoke an embodied visual experience. This contrast generates a transient exchange between subjectivity of personal memory and consciousness of the infinite or eternal.

Julia Bland (b. in Palo Alto, 1986) received her MFA from Yale in 2012, and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. In 2008, she received the Natasha and Jacques Gelman Travel Fellowship to study Islamic art and Sufism in Morocco. Recent group exhibitions include On Stellar Rays, New York; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York; Anna Kustera Gallery, New York. She is currently a resident in the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program.