Julia Baroni

Biography

Julia Baroni makes paintings, collages, prints, and above all, drawings. Her work engages an ongoing visual vocabulary of everyday objects and body parts. She is interested in the ability of a single drawing to spawn horizons of connections, images, and memories in its viewer. Julia’s artistic practice is rooted in daily rapport with her sketchbook. She thinks of drawing as something like going to the bathroom. In May, Julia will graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy alongside her Bachelor of Fine Arts. In July, she will begin her teaching career.

Artist Statement

The ship that launched a thousand faces is a maximalist attempt to enact my visual language on the gallery space, to transmit the pleasurable release that the process of drawing is for me, and to make people guess about the visual metaphors employed. The work explores themes of loneliness, longing, aggression, and ambivalence about (admiration for and cruelty toward) women's bodies.

The project consists of a set of manipulable life-size paintings on acetate, a few smaller paintings on canvas, some printed publications which include original writing and a roadmap to my symbols, and a large-scale mural.

In the life-size paintings, each composition is a web-like amalgamation of drawings I extracted from my sketchbook, printed on transparent film, and airbrushed from the back. The airbrush’s quality of spitting out paint mimics my excretive relationship to drawing. This creates an airy texture reminiscent of images of memories and digital painting. The paintings sit on a large, low plinth, and viewers are encouraged to explore the back sides of the work, the new images they make when they play around with the paintings, and what it feels like to drag and twist a flat human body of about their own size.

The smaller paintings are dreamy intermissions to the excess of visual material and linework in the rest of the project. These paintings typically focus on living vicariously through one to two inanimate objects, like light switches or the rim jet of an empty toilet bowl.

The publications explore impossible wishes and thoughts on making art. They become a kind of illustrated artist statement processed through an ephemeral medium, fitting for this point in time.

The mural links everything together. It is yet another extracted sketchbook image, painted from a projected image onto the wall. The mural links conceptual and material themes across my whole project and is a curatorial strategy to draw people into the show, as it will be visible from outside the gallery.

Ultimately, I want this work to provide a phenomenologically rich and humorous experience. My hope is that the excess of visual information allows people to really engage with the work and be challenged in their interpretations.

Website: juliabaroni.com

Instagram: @juli0ni

Email: juliabaroni14@gmail.com