Julie Harrison is a visual artist based in New York City who has moved between drawing, photography, video, painting, and performance.
It seems that Harrison is attuned to some essential, fluidly dynamic core aspect of organic life that she perceives in all species and that she very much is contributing to our awareness of not just the forms but their qualities with her art. It may be ventured to say that she is among those artists working today across many mediums, who newly transmit awareness of our ecological co-habitations.
Some microorganisms protect life and others destroy it.
The deeper I look at any of [Julie’s] drawings, the more I feel drawn into important secret places where the ‘forbidden’ or ‘clandestine’ opens. Textures play off of one another and combine – or resist combination in surprising ways – yet that’s what lets us in.
I am delighted to see [Julie’s] photographic diptychs proceed to blast away pretexts so as to bring us closer, not to truth, a category long ago shattered, but to the realization of new desires. That is what makes her images so awe-inspiring. It encourages a complex and ambiguous political vision of resistance and investigation, one which would be increasingly valuable to a social movement based on skepticism as it strengthens unique personal powers of imagination and critical thinking.
Violence pervades the news in the United States; shootings on the street, in schools and the workplace seem routine. Most of us are out of touch with the real violence of poverty and struggle. In my work I re-purpose images from magazines to create a more nuanced interpretation of the news. My photographs, rooted in pictorial history, are not collaged or computer manipulated, yet reveal a painterly aesthetic that transcends and re-frames the violence behind them. I utilize the diptych as a method for reinforcing the notion of my art practice as a mapping or recording of time.