Created Compost @ The Alice
Our American dream applauds those who can make all of the right moves, take the tough decisions, get the job done. However, for the rest of us, our everyday worlds are increasingly a hyper-normalization of immediacy, confusion and obfuscation. Our mediums tell us what to know and what to understand, but not how to act. We watch, we pause, consider, yet still we cannot decide.
This modern specter of indecision hovers over Julie Alexander’s richly varied compositions, a shadow suspended between the one and the other. Her work, - modest, layered and richly colored, careful in its carelessness - takes this crisis of determination and weaves it into a meditation on the means of deciding.
If our everyday existence, if our every artwork, is made up of thousands of immediate decision points - go left, turn right, place this here, that there, make this mark, sew this color - then Julie’s work keeps those decision points open, floating in the slight spring breeze from the door that we have left ajar. In her states of ephemeral grace, the table is set, but nothing is finished, and everything is still possible.
Ben Heywood 2017