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Like Jess, I fell in love with Julia’s art as soon as we walked into the exhibition! Two aspects struck me immediately: her style echoes that of the hyper-realist Chuck Close, who is famous for his portraits. To me, Jacquette’s work lands somewhere between Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” and a Chuck Close portrait. Close was left suddenly paralyzed in the midst of a blossoming career after suffering a sudden spinal artery collapse. He was forced thereafter to work from a wheelchair and to reconsider his technique, painting for a time with a brush strapped to his wrist. In turn, Close’s portraits became less rigidly hyper-realist, as he began to work with gridded paintings based on repeated shapes. Up close the forms were difficult to discern, but from afar, these portraits are not so different from the average hyper-realist work. While Julia is not working with portraits, stylistically I saw a parallel in the way that they both play with expectations//push artistic boundaries, as well as the use of color.

While Close reframed the boundaries of the hyper-realist genre with the painting style he established after his paralyzation, Jacquette conducts a similar genre or style-bending act in introducing text into her garish, almost ad-like images of food. In her various images, the text is presented as either labels or instructions. One could be reading either a text book, a children’s picture book, or the menu at a pastry shop upon first look at her images. Yet the text itself is striking and poetic, and at times deeply at odds with the bright imagery to which it is linked. I particularly loved “Your Every Word a Perfect Jewel and Knife in My Own Heart.” The stark contrast between the bright, romantic, pink and red tones of the desserts depicted and the sharpness-the bleeding-of the words, is quite striking. The dichotomy between image and text prompted my reflection upon the extent of an artist’s control over the way in which their work is viewed. Who sees what first/which side of the mirror? Jacquette forces you to either read a text expounded by an image, or an image elucidated through text. All semester, this course has centered on grappling with how to process this simultaneous bombardment with the visual and the textual-but to me this Julia Jacquette piece is the most overt example of the ways in which the two collide: a connection that is nuanced and undeniably symbiotic.

I am really looking forward to talking with her in class tomorrow!

Last class when we peaked into Julia Jacquette’s exhibition I instantly fell in love with her work. Her theme of play is exciting for viewers because it is something everyone can relate to. As we discussed in class, the word ‘play’ incorporates ideas of being active, subjective,  imaginative, vibrant, and nostalgic. To ‘play’ also means to break the norm and is usually as an expression of escapism in which free choice serves one’s entertainment and contributes to the formation of human culture. What Julia does is play. She has created wildly imaginative pieces of artwork that are so interesting upon first sight, but even more captivating after learning the story behind them. Turning concrete objects into something abstract and exceeding boundaries, but still enabling viewers to see the actual commercialized objects makes Jacquette a visionary that isn’t afraid of a challenge.

There is one piece that I want to buy because to me it resembles the richness of life and presents this warm glowing vibe that makes me feel happy. To me happiness is the essence of play and I believe Jacquette’s execution makes people think of things that make them happy in a sort of childlike manner.  Her work is playful and mesmerizing. The elegance in execution and gold illumination of this piece makes me think that if it were the only artwork on the wall, people would be completely immersed in its beauty. I also think that after discovering it’s from a Dior advertisement there is a  certain allure of taking a closer look at a high end brands. Below is the image:

What is your favorite piece from the exhibit?

What do you think of this piece?

When I think of playing as a little kid, one of the first things that comes to mind is color. Children love to color at restaurants, draw with chalk on the sidewalk, look at colorful books. The lack of color in Julia Jacquette’s Playground of My Mind is a little surprising. The cover of the book has hints of color and the fist page includes a bright blue jacket, but all color then disappears until the last few pages. I wonder why Jacquette decided to use color so sparingly. The lack of color also stands out from her other pieces of artwork on display at the Wellin which use bold colors.

The colorless pages kind of remind me of a coloring book. Perhaps this is what she was going for. Or maybe she wanted the reader/viewer to have to “play” and use his or her imagination to fill in the missing details. Although this book is a memoir, Jacquette allows the reader to add a personal touch by not including every feature. Do people think the book is more effective being mostly black and white?

Julia Jacquette’s Playground of My Mind can be defined as a visual memoir. Although it does not go as in depth into her personal history as a typical memoir would, its visual elements present their own ways of creating a personal feel to the book. One way in which Jacquette accomplished this is through the appearance of the text, which looks as though it has been hand-written. The look of having every word written out by hand imbues the text with more personal meaning and importance than can be felt by looking at the text of a typical printed book, which gains import only after it has been read. The handwriting works together with the placement of the images and the way that these pictures are presented almost as looking like polaroids to create a kind of scrapbook feel.

Another strategy Jacquette uses to create a more intimate feel to the book is leaving some of the pale gray and blue lines she used to plan out the spacing of the pages in the background, as can be seen in the image above. This allows the reader/viewer to feel as if they are getting an inside look into Jacquette’s process of creation. The lines are made even more interesting with the fact that they are only included in some pages, while other pages have totally clean white backgrounds. This reveals the intentionality of leaving the lines behind, possibly as a device to draw in the reader.

When looking around the exhibit today, the piece that struck me the most was the first one we saw– “Hands (Women Rock Musicians)” series, 2016. I thought the medium of glazed ceramic tiles gave these paintings a stunning, three dimensional presence.  Hearing Sungmin’s take on the piece was very interesting to me. He explained that Julia Jacquette wanted to convey the more realistic elements of female hands. In advertisements and media, female hands are often perfectly smooth, delicate, and free of scars or blemishes. Julia paints these hands in their realist forms, and choosing to convey the hands of famous female rockers is even more bad-ass in my opinion. There is something completely raw and powerful about these images, and it felt like a very positive expression of art, rather than some of the more critical and negative paintings later on in the exhibit. 

Looking at Julia Jacquette’s pieces made me think a lot about depicting the ‘personal’ in art. After going through some of the pages of her book and walking through her exhibit with the guide, I wondered how each aspect of this experience must have been like for her. The first aspect I thought about was endeavoring to distill your experiences and emotions into something tactile and possibly stagnant in its movement (paintings for example). Was it incredibly stressful to try and show that? Does everything she’s created feel perfectly honest and an accurate depiction of what she imagines in her head? Are the stakes of all of these perfections and truths higher because this is about her and about the people she loves? When she depicts her mother, for example, does she worry that she will offend her or offend her own memory of her?

A second stage I thought about was pitching these ideas to other people, trying to get them to take her work professionally. If work was ever rejected, did that feel like a personal rejection of her life story and the way she decided to show it? Of course, most art has a degree of ‘the personal’, but I imagine that memoire work is more directly so.

A third quality I imagined was the way that the public reads your work once it’s out, their degree of personal interest or enjoyment of it. Did she worry that people wouldn’t associate the same objects that she depicts with the exact emotions that she cites? Was it more important to her to show how she felt or appeal to something that she hoped others felt? The work below is an example of this – the sensuous quality of the cream and the sweetness of the dessert could possibly be associated with intimacy for anyone, but it’s application seems to be one that’s specific to her own experience.

Gorey’s Hapless Child was so striking to me after we read it in class today that I’ve been thinking of it since. After going back to it for the second time, I noticed many things I didn’t see the first time. For example, the little girl appears in the pristine white dress in the first pictures, almost glowing with happiness. Then at the school she’s clothed in black but returns to a white gown after her escape. However, it is not the same whiteness–it slowly dirties and grays as the story progresses, to the ultimate tattered state it’s in when she’s run over. This is very symbolic of the little girl’s own mental and physical condition. Her father, too, comes back starkly different from when he first appears.

Physically, he remains the same large, muscled man. He’s still in clothed in furs, although the one in which he returns in boasts a much more ostentatious patterning. What I noticed, however, were his large goggles covering his eyes.

It could just be part of his outfit as a driver to keep it consistent with the story but it’s interesting to consider the idea that it may be symbolic of him, having gone abroad and returned with all these riches, become blind to his family. Even when he’s holding his little girl there is no recognition she is his daughter and for me, this is what makes the ending most tragic of all. It breaks the most fundamental relationship between a parent and child, making an already depressing ending utterly heartbreaking.

I thought our discussion on children’s books this morning was an interesting one. We talked about how these books can be initially viewed as created for children. However, upon further examination, they are clearly for adults. Why would an artist or writer create a picture/ comic book that was geared towards adults when the stigma around these types of books is that they are only for kids? I believe the answer to this questions can be closely related to standup comedy. A comedian often discusses dark and serious topics in their routing but they are not as hard to discuss because it is being talked about with a comedic undertone. Therefore, it is easier for adults to talk and listen about these hard topics when there is a playful side to the argument. Presenting intense topics in the form of a children’s books is no different. Having cartoons and illuminated pictures helps ease the mind of the serious content. For example, the comic book Maus describes one man’s holocaust experience through cartoon animals. This allows the deeply painful events of the holocaust to be viewed upon in a different manner, one that is easier to digest than a typical book.

I usually try to pay particular attention to small details and I get really excited when I notice them, especially recurring ones. Gorey’s Amphigorey provided me with a plethora of these. One story with these subtle details is The Doubtful Guest.

To be honest, I did not notice this detail until the very end of the story. I did not know what kind of time period this story spanned until the very last image under which Gorey tells us that this story is 17 years long. After learning this, I flipped back through the story to look for evidence of this passage in time. I followed the guest and it didn’t seem to change with time. But then again, it is a creature that is unknown to us so maybe one of its characteristics is that it does not age. I then decided that the best way to follow the human characters was to count how many there were and see if they changed as the story progressed. I followed the four adults and they did not seem to change that much throughout the story. Then I paid attention to the little, fair haired boy and finally found evidence of this passage of time!

In the beginning, the boy is very young. Young enough to be clinging to, who I perceive to be, his mother’s hand and where a typical English boy’s outfit.

As the story goes on, the boy grows up a little and wears more grown up clothes and is a little more independent.

By the end of the story, he is so grown up that he is roughly the same height as the adults, and is dressed in very formal, grown up attire.

I think I did not notice the little boy at first because I was more interested in the creature and following all the peculiar things he did. I was also interested in the adults because they showed an active response to the creature, whereas the boy was just a passive observer in all these shenanigans. It is beautiful how Gorey incorporates very subtle details in his stories. They add more depth and nuances to the stories than the readers initially recognize when they read the stories for the first time.