Julie Weitz, born 1979
Lives and works in Tampa, FL
Statement:
In these new drawings, the mask becomes optically illusive, politically deflated and unpredictably simple. I conflate foreground with background, repeat layers of striped pattern, and reduce color to highly contrasted values; at the crux of these new works is my investigation into the indistinguishability between self and other.
Bio:
Julie Weitz was born in Chicago, IL in 1979 and currently lives and works in Tampa, Florida. She is a 2010 recipient of the West Prize awarded by the West Collection. Weitz has shown nationally at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Schroeder Romero, New York, NY, Thomas Robertello Gallery, Chicago, IL and Marine Contemporary Art Salon, Santa Monica, CA. Her work has been featured on the cover of New American Painting and has been reviewed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Artweek, and Creative Loafing. In October a solo show of her work will open at Tempus Projects in Tampa, FL.
August 2nd, 2010at 1:14 pm(#)
Nice
F-ed Up
Op Art
Good to See
Use of line
And Color
In abstract forms
Playing with Shape
And perception
Of flat space
Don’t really see
Importance
Of the Mask
Or need of meaning
In THAT
Or why I should
Have to think
About
THAT
But
HOWEVER
Nice
August 10th, 2010at 9:56 pm(#)
Interesting to follow your work over the years, to see how this has evolved from your previous masks.
August 14th, 2010at 3:59 am(#)
This has emotional, pure-philosophical and other intellectual integrity (e.g. political). The concept of masking to render anonymous is not new (axiomatic) but what is fresh is to then make the mask anonymous – that is brill. In Viennese masque balls, for example, people were anonymous behind their masks but those masks were distinguished. Here you have sough to (and achieved methinks) double-blending the anonymity. The person has disappeared so completely that (a) one wonders if s/he ever existed and (b) any attempts to discover would, at most, only tell us more about the masks themselves.
Given your stated aim: “my investigation into the indistinguishability between self and other” you have certainly succeeded in shedding new dark on the self. It has, indeed, become indistinguishable. These blended-in masks, for me, represent society’s cultural imposition – be it from the tyranny of (say) Nazism to the social problem of young girls dangerously-thinning to appear more like celebs. The self has been lost to the degree that even the self’s persona is being subsumed.
Brill work, Julie. Well done.