02.23 — 03.22.25
Devening Projects is pleased to present Julia Hechtman’s fourth solo show with the gallery. Apparitions features new video and ceramic sculpture. The exhibition opens on Sunday, February 23 and continues until March 22, 2025.
Julia Hechtman’s artwork unpacks the natural world as a shifting phenomenon—both an artwork and an archive of people and place. She works to better understand and convey to the viewer the contradictions and tensions that exist in the active experience between absence and presence, the urban and the natural, living and dead, and the authentic and the invented, to name just a few.
Far from a reduction or simplification of effect, her straightforward approach explores how essential practices can reveal deeper, more visceral investigations into life, environment, and history. Instead of focusing on the spectacular, she seeks the sublime in the small-scale and the overlooked. Hechtman aims to interpret the landscape, flora, and fauna in a way that is not only extractive.
Julia Hechtman is a visual artist who makes works dealing with issues of agency and control, absence and presence, life and death, and real-time experience in her multi-faceted studio practice. The natural world features prominently in her works, which has allowed her to travel extensively, and to contemplate the familiar in new ways. Her favorite place to go is the Arctic. In 2019 she was a Fulbright Scholar in Reykjavik at Lístaháskolí Íslands, where she pursued her research into the roles of landscape and memory in identity production, and in 2024 she traveled to Svalbard with the Arctic Circle Artist Residency.
Video links:
“Mig dreymir á íslensku/I am dreaming in Icelandic”
“Apparitions”
“objet trouvé”
NGN Magazine article on Julia Hechtman’s Arctic Circle research project
“The Intersection of Art and Science: Julia Hechtman’s Exploration in the Arctic”
