Julie Mehretu
Notes from ‘Grey Area’: An introduction to Julie Mehretu
Her paintings draft narratives of urban development and their impact on an individuals experience. Her renderings of cartographic and architectural plans form the foundation for layered compositions.
Uses – flight plans, airport architecture, sports arenas, military fortifications, city maps - to investigate how the physical sites and less literal structures, social, economic and politic activity unfold.
References ‘architecture’ as a metaphor for spaces and ideas of power
Techniques – colour, dynamic mark making, resemble diagrams of weather patterns or shifting air masses – but also signify human activity, refers to marks as characters, reflects theme of formation of social identity, marks present a multitude of stories, relationship between marks portray interaction of individuals and communities with each other and their environment.
Marks suggest a collective energy and denote places of atmosphere, looser gestures cause them to resemble less figures than forces of energy
Image changes depending on your physical relationship to it: at a distance like looking at a city, cosmology from afar; close up – image shatters into numerous other stories, events. The viewer pieces a narrative as ones experiences of the city comprise distinct moments, scenes, acts. Viewer changes position to take in shifts in scale and layered imagery, explores psychogeographic landscape
Two approaches
Technical construction: loads of lines, marks, shapes, overlapping shapes of colour, clouds of pigment, like a series of erasures, each stage eradicating the last.
History not entirely rubbed out – it is inscribed, layering and partial veiling of information along lines of multiple viewpoints
Notes from 'An Archaeology of the Air' by Bruce Dillon (from Grey Area)
Theme of contemporary urban warfare -city is constantly redrawn and imagined ‘explosion of the boundary’
Dust – accretion of images is it’s own form of erasure, blurs distinctions between forms and effacing outlines of familiar historical narratives
Underlying lattice of architectural or cartographic forms is further confused by drama of the line, symbol and brush stroke
Erases selected areas of drawing and marks producing effect of dust cloud, Julie Mehretu’s grey is ‘the colour of possibility of the inchoate and unrealised.’
Her paintings are indebted to destruction and decay, lines of flight, pursuit, escape, accompanied by a more diffuse surface
Background
My background is in architecture. My point of departure for the MA was the final project for my diploma where I digitally assembled and collaged a collection of mappings (aerial, shadow, text, texture, cartographic, cognitive, psychogeographic, data) of an urban site into a virtual landscape, ‘the archive’. It was a subjective response to the site and an attempt to present a fractured urban narrative which would resist linear interpretation. The archive was also animated to reflect a virtual cyberspace - a transient landscape in constant flux.
I had designed a digital environment, but going forward I would be concerned about:
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how I develop these techniques to generate more tactile renderings
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how I re-frame my interests within the context of an art practice to distil a clear message
ARTIST STATEMENT
Jennifer is an artist, printmaker and architect living in London, making images and 3d works.
Jennifer originally studied Mathematics at Warwick university, but after completing her degree went on to become an architect where she worked for a range of practices. Her interest in image making and specifically printmaking was then developed by completing an MA in Fine Art (Printmaking) at Camberwell UAL. in 2021.. Jennifer is currently part of the Part of MASS Turps Sculpture program 2022/23 and alongside this helps manage Bainbridge Print Studios (open access print studios for artists and designers.)
Jennifer is interested in making images, forms and spaces through print. and sculpture. Her two dimensional works utilise a range of print processes such as silk screen, cyanotype and intaglio.. Her sculpture work includes works in metal, wood, concrete and plaster.
Jennifer is particularly drawn to mapping - exploring both physical locations and psychological spaces to construct new landscapes that question the nature of our relationship to the environment and attempt to articulate the disjunction of lived space. Her work explores ways in which these landscapes can communicate ideas about scale, the correspondence between the macro and the micro whilst inhabiting a liminal space. A preoccupation between the shifting nature of the real and the virtual runs through the work. The iterative digital and physical process of the making allude to the impact of digital media on our perceptions of space, time and embodiment.
The grid is a recurring theme within her work, drawing on its references to measurement, construction, occupation, the ghostly lines of Euclidean geometry and its counterpoint to a more complex actuality and non-linear nature (the ‘mesh’) of the physical environment. Jennifer is also interested in what lies ‘underfoot’, the ground and the layers of strata, geological and living organisms that remain largely concealed beneath our feet. Her works in concrete and plaster explore the imprints of past occupation embodied in the textures of the ground. They attempt to capture the tension between a man made material language and fragments of natural disruption and fissure that seep through the everyday.