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
LASER ETCHINGS | Flawed Fabrication Series
In this series of laser etchings, I used photogrammatory / 3D-scanning which maps photographs of an object to collect data on its volumes and contours to create a 3d mesh.
These surfaces and spaces can then be studied at micro or macro scales, the software maps the surface in a peculiar act of cartography, where it might focus your attention to accidental (normally overlooked) details. The survey which normally implies precision and objectivity is now reversed.
In the Flawed Fabrication Series I photographed tree trunks and manipulated these resultant meshes to produce a series of laser etchings on paper. I wanted the images to be ambiguous and offer a different perspective on their form and surface. The laser etching process lends an almost ghostly aesthetic. In addition the delicate and fragile rips that can come out of the laser etching process further blemish the finished work and become a celebrated aspect of the work. I would hope the viewer could fall into a moment of suspension of knowledge or certainty as to what these ambiguous and ephemeral images are.
