JULIA MARTIN, interdisciplinary artist, purported psychic, professional fool.
CONTENTS
1. FRENCH FOR BEGINNERS
2. CUT ME DOWN/SPLIT ME OPEN/BURN ME UP
3. I’LL BE THE TREE, YOU BE THE AXE
4. OVERSHARE
5. AFTER FRIDAY
6. DAYS ENDING IN WHY
7. YOU ARE TALKING TO YOURSELF
8. I SAW THIS COMING
In the literature guiding pet owners through the process of putting down an ailing animal, there is a checklist of questions to consider.
One must observe their physical state: is the animal tearing at itself? Is it missing hair? Does it hide itself away out of reach?
I read the last questions over and over
Does it still like to play? Does it seem happy?
Sometimes I observe myself in a mirror, in photographs and ask
Does it still like to play? Does it seem happy?
The art is not just the story, but how it is told. The platforms of our narratives have become intractable from how we tell those stories, and so too, the content. I make art about social media, about my phone’s contents, and I exhibit that art on the internet, from my cell phone, on social media. My practice is terrifyingly meta, constantly shifting, and always on the precipice of obsolescence. This relationship between tool and output is reflected back through my body and work.
I am preoccupied with the cell phone as an extension of the body, an archive of experience, and living document. Digital vernacular images, snapshots, videos, are a quickly evolving language. Phones constant companions, we shoot first and ask questions later, recording and documenting is faster and more voluminous than ever before, data unruly and unchecked by the seemingly limitless but entirely fallible cloud. Media-sharing platforms allow for elevated narrative arrangement of day-to-day banality, we watch each other, and we watch our watchers watching.
Narrative and dark humour are foundational to my photographic practice; sequences and pairings to deliver punchlines. With a cell phone, my work has become instinctual and reflexive in the taking, the editing is delayed, ruminative, and determinedly undetermined, a process in distinct parts. Web and Instagram are where I play with time and space, measuring the reading of my images and words, expanding a pause or removing the breath between images. multiple meanings are created through the openness of arrangement, rearrangement, pattern recognition, and matching.
I make deliberate use of contemporary image conventions and clichés, speaking this language so that I can amuse myself with its words. In the carefully staged theatre of life playing out on social media, there is an expectation that we must telegraph our wellness, bright smiles, shiny hair, and glowing skin. We know the filters and selective vocabulary of this kind of performative living. In subverting these markers, I aestheticize my body horror, showing a softer side of disintegration.
I like to play.
I just make my own games.