JULIE WOLFE

Julie Wolfe is a multimedia artist whose work visualizes the diffuse, the immaterial, and the invisible. Wolfe’s intuitive artistic process develops an emergent language of form, probing the depths of collective consciousness while engaging individual viewers uniquely and subjectively. Synesthetic associations of color and shape demonstrate the slippage between different modes of communication, making meaning out of chance and play as well as deconstructing traditional aesthetic conventions. Her practice approaches impermanence, uncertainty, and tension (formal, political, or interpersonal) as tools rather than obstacles. Distinct series are conceptually linked, taking up similar problems and exploring them in new material ways.

Though her art is grounded in real referents as diverse as environment degradation, human communication, and scientific data, the resulting works expand into new realms and modes of perception, taking the form of imaginary landscapes and fundamentally unreal spaces. The positive is balanced with the negative: the aesthetic with the destructive, the natural with the human, and the image with the abstract. Though not necessarily depicted in harmonious union, opposing forces are explored as equally meaningful.

Wolfe’s practice is just as much about seeing as it is about creating. Self-reflexive projects like a photographic archive of eyes consider all that shapes visual experience while dizzying, radial paintings point to the illusory nature of art. Such art makes the intangible tangible and legible in a different, material way, though it is neither purely didactic nor prescriptive: be they photographs, drawings, sculptural structures, large abstract paintings, or wall installations. Wolfe’s work encourages its viewers to contemplatively meditate, on their own terms and within their own frame of reference, on that which confronts them. Wolfe asks her spectator, through her work, what data is meaningful and what isn’t? What if we could appreciate the infinitely more complex systems that thrive in our natural world? How can we relate to one another and forge a shared horizon? Julie Wolfe ultimately invites us to examine our simultaneous particularity and generality as well as the ways that visual art can unite us as sensing, perceiving creatures.

Artist and creator Julie Wolfe received her BFA in Painting and Art History in Texas in 1986. The light of the California coast influenced her early works when she lived near Los Angeles and began experimenting with different art forms. After a move to Washington, DC she has become one of the most influential and prolific artists in the area. Her career continues to blossom through participation in numerous personal exhibitions including a major retrospective at American University, Katzen Museum, DC, in 2017.The artist has been reviewed in important national publications, namely ArtNews, The Washington Post, Hyperallergic and BBC World News America. Her works are collected by many private and public institutions, including National Gallery of Art the National Museum of Women in the Arts, New York Public Library and US Embassies in Bulgaria, France and Ecuador. Wolfe lives and works in Washington, DC.