10.14 – 12.08.12
Julia Hechtman’s work organizes and re-frames the contradictions that make up her life experiences. The process builds suspense and creates tension between absence and presence, the urban and the natural and between the authentic and the invented. Her interests range from the everyday to the spectacular; it’s her goal to capture these moments at each end of this spectrum in every work. In What’s His is Mine, she uses material passed down from her late father in a series of still-life images that bring a past and distant connection fully into the present. Her father passed away when she was 15; his effects, particularly gear from his time in the army during WWII, now become the vehicle through which she processes their relationship and its role in her current life and practice. Like much of her recent work, this project bypasses the spectacular in order to locate and identify the sublime in the small-scale and the overlooked.
Julia Hechtman is an interdisciplinary artist based in NYC and Boston. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her BFA from Syracuse University. She has shown her work nationally and internationally in exhibitions that include Second Nature at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Chain Letter at Samson and Vast Vistas: Landscape in New Media at CyberArts, in Massachusetts; Gravity Matters and Shadowy Folds at dok25a in Dusseldorf, Germany; and Irrationalism at devening projects + editions, among many others. Her videos are part of the Video Data Bank’s collection in Chicago and have been screened recently in London’s 52nd Film Festival, at City Art Rooms in Auckland, NZ and at The Artist Foundation in Boston. She teaches at Northeastern University; this past summer she taught an interdisciplinary, intensive studio course at The Burren College of Art in Ireland as part of Northeastern’s study abroad program.
