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
DISLOCATION SERIES - MAY to AUGUST 2022
I was invited to exhibit a site specific series of work at Rodic Davidson Architects in Bloomsbury. My point of departure became the British Museum, which seemed to me to have defined the character of the surrounding area.
The establishment of the British Museum was the beginning of the development of an educational hub that lead to many other educational institutions also setting up in Bloomsbury. I took this as my point of departure and started to collect and record textures of the site in the same way the British Museum has collected (ordered and catalogued) artefacts from around the world. However, these were small scale, trivial fragments and fissures of the built environment – a form of contemporary archaeology.
The screen prints map and collage fragments from the historical maps, collected textures, British Museum catalogue references and grid lines. The catalogue numbers refer to the Benin Placques and Australian Aboriginal artefacts, both which have had requests to be returned. The grid lines symbolise the process of mapping and measuring the globe, they are completely abstract with no physical substance, but invested with authority when used to partition and bound space. They intersect with the shadow forms, alluding to the shadows of colonialism. The red dashed lines derive their form from the division of the fields that once stood at this site, in contrast to the grids they are not straight and attempt to imply a dynamic movement through the space.
