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Julia Hechtman: Suddenly Everything Has Changed

December 18, 2014 - January 31, 2015
Opening reception: Thursday, December 18, 5-7pm
Artist talk: Saturday, January 24th, 2015 at 3pm

Artist's Statement
My work subtly alters the familiar and ordinary to create a state of renewed interest and active engagement with images, objects, and events. I am interested in collections, sentimentality and in recall. With regard to production I am interested in investigating how still and moving images can deliver meaning, and structure compositions, objects, and installations in a way that reproduces the quality of the first-hand encounter. I work to better understand and to convey to the viewer the contradictions and tensions that exist in active experience; between absence and presence, the urban and the natural, and the authentic and the invented. The ultimate goal remains to deliver the viewer into a fully formed state of awareness that forwards concept and motivates productive conversation.

I explore and question the value of “essentializing” meanings as they relate to time, movement, thought, action, emotion and ultimately, communication. Far from a reduction or simplification of effect I am interested in exploring how these essential practices can reveal deeper more visceral investigations into life, environment and history (both personal and cultural). Balance, as a way of working, conceptually and materially is at the heart of all that I do. To this end, for the last several years I have been seeking out details that are often taken for granted through the use of photography, sculpture, animation and video. As opposed to imaging the spectacular, I seek the sublime in the small-scale and the overlooked.

Catalogue Essay: "On the Work of Julia Hechtman" by Evan Smith

Julia Hechtman is an interdisciplinary artist based in Boston. She received her MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago and her BFA from Syracuse University. She has shown her work nationally and internationally in exhibitions that include Untitled (Hybrid) at Robert Miller Gallery in NYC; Irrationalism and What’s His Is Mine at devening projects + editions in Chicago; Place as Idea at Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts; Gravity Matters and Shadowy Folds at dok25a in Dusseldorf, Germany; among many others. Her videos are part of the Video Data Bank’s collection in Chicago and have been screened recently in London’s 52nd Film Festival, at City Art Rooms in Auckland, New Zealand and at The deCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She co-founded Proof Gallery in South Boston in 2007 and teaches at Northeastern University in Boston.