It's been a while since I've written anything, and with good reason - I've been busy! I moved up to Portland, OR right after the holidays, and by now I'm fairly ensconced. I hated to leave my studio behind, but now that I'm working from home I'm getting a lot more accomplished! Except in the whole interacting-with-people aspect. I reorganized the site a bit, to make it less cluttered, and I put up a bunch of new art.
The photos are something I started working on very recently. For pure laziness' sake, I'll just cut and paste a paragraph out of my artist statement: The photographs Julia uses in her series are all of strangers. She finds them in junk stores and antique malls, abandoned or lost by the people who once treasured them. By altering them she gives them new context, invents a new story for them to tell. She reuses images, often recognizable, from old entertainment magazines because she enjoys the private preconceptions that people connect with images they recognize. Anyone looking at one of her photographs can create his or her own story, and someone whose image was lost in the bottom of a filing cabinet gets to live a new life. Borrowed imagery is something that really appeals to me, which is why I've really been getting into pop art and post-abstract-expressionism lately. I read biographies of Warhol and Rauschenberg, both of course incredibly interesting artists, if intimidating in their total brilliance. But I want my stuff to be a little more personal than theirs. There aren't really any movements anymore. Everyone does their own thing, and mine is pretty autobiographical, even if I'm appropriating images that belong to the general public. The paintings are still pretty straight-up portraits. I'm thinking of sticking some collage in there, or some crochet, but right now I'm really enjoying the specific focus. If I don't paint a portrait of Commander Riker, who will?
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Julia Cooper
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