JULIA HECHTMAN | Apparitions | February 23 – 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.
“Something about those kinds of extreme places is that death has kind of a big presence there,” said Hechtman, who is also a death doula. “The idea of looking closely at death (and) thinking about death as part of the life cycle is something that I’m actually really engaged with. … A dead bird will wash up on the shore in these remote locations and nothing happens to it. There’s nobody cleaning up the mess. There are no land mammals that eat those things, and so they just decompose over time. You can really look at something after it’s dead, because it just remains there. I’m engaged by that. ¶ She also worked on video projects that explored people’s relationships to their landscapes and “how we as humans think we’re the most important thing. ¶ The landscapes are actually far more interesting than we are,” Hechtman added. “But if there’s a human in the frame of a photograph or of a video, you look at the human because that’s what our brains are trained to do.”
— essay in NGN Magazine by Erin Kayata
— essay in NGN Magazine by Erin Kayata
