Juxtapoz Magazine – Julie Curtiss Channels The Ghosts in “Somnambules (Sleepwalkers)”

There are specified paintings that just stop in your tracks, trigger you to pause, make you ponder and wonder and you experience immersed in a instant. That is what very good art does. That transpired to me when I observed the glorious function of Julie Curtiss for her new solo demonstrate, Somnambules, translated as “sleepwalkers,” and the painting Periods Sq. (found over). Curtiss has always been ready to equilibrium so a lot in a function present day stress, surrealism, comedy, loneliness and city daily life. Her deal with with us past Fall was like an omnipresent determine wanting in excess of a shattered planet, tranquil and looming, seeing more than a metropolis that experienced been remodeled and in a condition of uncertainty. Instances Sq. is what that determine may possibly have been wanting more than, a scene of the town as faceless inhabitants wander earlier a eyesight of paradise in their possess moody everyday existence. It can be effective. 

Her new demonstrate at Anton Kern Gallery is, once once more, a slight nod to surrealism and the fuzziness of sleep-deprivation. As the gallery notes, “This exhibition is a specifically personal a person for the artist. Plagued by insomnia and grappling with processing the toll the earlier couple of years have taken, Curtiss normally felt like a sleepwalker herself while generating this entire body of work–day and night, gentle and darkness working into just about every other in a blurry timeless vacuum.” What we have figured out in these previous few a long time is that time and each day lifetime have grow to be transfigured, wherever several hours blend in a different way as everyday living re-emerges and attempts to be usual. Each of us has had our moments of confusion and uncertainty, and these performs blur our reality of what we assume we see and what is familiar. 

Even with these kinds of talent and the potential to have a visible language that is the two hers and depicting the universal, Curtiss is completely coming into her individual as just one of the specific talents in modern day art. It truly is as if the earth caught up to her art. “I don’t forget when I started out this system of do the job, I was really interested in finding my very own voice and discovering distinct factors of my psyche in relation to culture.,” Curtiss informed us past year, and she is refining her voice in just about every clearly show. —Evan Pricco