...the word "transition" is floating up into my mind again. My feeling about these is that they are a bridge between pictures you made……to pictures that arrive on the viewers' eyeballs with all content contained within. There's continuity here from your earlier work in the way that something that looks "found"--in this case the white gauze or cloth or whatever--becomes useful for creating meaning. But now you are operating in a much more deliberate manner from before you make the picture onward, as opposed to making the pictures and then letting them bounce off each other to give each other a common cause. In other words you are going deeper into the studio and into the opportunities for control and direction therein, photographing what you see in your mind and not what you have found in front of your eyes. Though there is still an element of what I suspect to be serendipity--like the model's smile in "Covered #1." Here the darker feelings that the series explores are subverted by her expression--a subversion which can be read as resistance to being hidden on the part of both subject and photographer. All the photos are documents of resistance--they feel not like cries from beneath oppression but a demonstration of how absurd it is to attempt to oppress someone--the woman and by extension the artist (for she doesn't have much of an individuality to her, she reads to me more like the platform for your own feelings) are only imperfectly covered, by translucent material, not weighing enough to overwhelm a smile..... I think these mark a strong new starting point.

R. Gess, 2006

1/27/03 For immediate release
EYEDRUM SMALL GALLERY PRESENTS REVELATIONS BY JENNIFER JULIAN
February 6-March 1, 2003

Jennifer Julian's Revelations explores the relationships between artist and human subject, observation and knowledge, and sight and reality. In Revelations a set of portrait photographs on canvas serves as both a gathering of Julian's subjects and a cumulative portrait of the artist, a set of mirrors. To unite the group the artist will insert herself in the room in the form of a kinetic sculpture, an effigy collaged from self-portraits that slowly, continually rotates, scanning the subjects on the surrounding walls and anyone entering the gallery. "This project," says Julian, "has morphed into a personal realization and liberation. Like the people in the portrait images, I am breaking out of frames and onto canvas and off the walls and into sculpture." Revelations marks Jennifer Julian's transition beyond the traditional styles of her previous practice and into new modes of thought, new techniques, and new levels of emotional complexity.

Jennifer Julian attended Auburn University, the Art Institute of Atlanta, and the Atlanta College of Art. Her black and white photography has been widely exhibited in Atlanta since 1999; Revelations is her fourth solo show. She is a member of Women In Focus and currently teaches photography at the Cultural Arts Center in Douglasville. She lives in Douglasville, Georgia.

Eyedrum Small Gallery presents Jennifer Julian's Revelations from February 6 through March 1, 2003. Opening reception: Thursday, February 6, 6:30-8:30 p.m. Gallery hours: Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 12-5 and during all Eyedrum events.

Contact: Richard Gess, 404-727-6879, libgess@emory.edu

Eyedrum Gallery
290 MLK Jr. Dr SE
Suite 8
Atlanta GA 30312
404-522-0655
www.eyedrum.org

Essay from PATH

Not Just Black and White: Notes on the Works of Jennifer Julian
 
 
"I'm not a"photographer," I'm an artist."
            This deceptively simple declaration summarizes Jennifer's secession from the world of one particular kind of fine art photograph, in which elegant contrasts of the shades of gray are so important that the subject matter  is sometimes of less interest than the stunning effects achieved in the darkroom.
           Yet this is where she began, and where she established her credentials through the transformation of an already interesting outer world into a series of geometric spaces: The location is a specific city in Europe, and this object being photographed is a magnificent building and a girl aligned artfully with it, but in the end the subject comprises a series of basic shapes and rhythms: and here they are, beautifully presented.
            This is a long and respected photographic tradition, but for Julian it very quickly wasn't enough. After an early interest in the finely produced silver gelatin print, Julian progressed to that part of the art world in which the black and white photograph becomes a material to be violated en route to accomplishing greater ends. Images, she realized, could be cut, arranged, bonded to canvas, and generally treated as part of a larger meaningful whole or, rather, a larger collection of deeply meaningful fragments.
             In fact, ultimately her work is about wholeness, brokenness, and the inevitability of incompletion. A world of fundamental experiences and dilemmas are summed up in Julian's pilgrimage from the formal geometry of the world to personally involved symbols for the situation of herself and others. It is in fact felt as a pilgrimage, or a path; internally directed, or directed by the demands of art.
            In the "Revelations" series, exhibited as a single installation, figures and faces are presented in a manner that addresses both their dignity and their pathos. Variations in the size of prints, repetition of images, and placement of young and old next to one another establish Julian's perspective on the human condition: connected to one another, but never able to gain full realization of that connection.
            The technique allows for gentle satire in its presentation of those judgmental souls for whom outward dogma prevents any sense of inner uncertainty...which means, of course, that they never realize just how broken and incomplete they themselves are.
            In Julian's sight, we are all broken (herself included). This knowledge of our inevitably damaged finiteness is symbolized in her work by the disconnected images that merge, overlap, and only sometimes leave gaps. Hypothetically, you could put Humpty-Dumpty together again with the right equipment; vase restorers do it all the time. You couldn't put Julian's characters together again, simply because most of the time there would be pieces left over. The parallels to our day-by-day succession of partial perceptions scarcely need to be spelled out, although whole books have been written on the general topic that Julian sums up in these visual metaphors.
            This is also why these pieces are, as Julian says, self-portraits; this is her view of the world and the people she knows in it, not an objective slice of life or one of the late Henri Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moments." The segmented images of her own face that cover the slowly rotating cube in the middle of the gallery space aptly symbolize her involvement with the entirety of the images that surround her, and symbolize as well the notion that her understanding of herself is assembled moment by moment, just as her comprehension of the people around her depends on a succession of partial experiences.
            The metaphor, the vision, and the technique serve Julian well in the portraiture and landscape of the "Southland" series, which was begun before the making of "Revelations" and has been re-imagined and re-created in the wake of the later series. The undivided images work perfectly well as uncomplicated glimpses of rural scenery: a railroad, a trough, a barn. Some even pay homage to Julian's photographic forebears; her white picket fence alludes to the one in another latitude that Paul Strand captured so memorably.
            In these more conventionally presented prints, only a wry choice of title here and there indicates Julian's personal viewpoint about the lives and choices of the people who inhabit these sensitively documented vistas. And yet these moments of Southern living are revelatory in their own subtle way; these personally expressive photographs will never be mistaken for travel photography. They, too, reflect the knowledge that we never see truth whole; and the gaps and repeats in these photographs in some later versions of their installation represent a panorama that looks, at first glance, perfectly plausible until the attempt to make overall sense of it reveals its impossibility. On the other hand, what we see is what we see, and it impacts us immediately.
            Julian's most recent body of work, still in progress as this book goes to press, leaves behind the documentation of people and places and takes up the incarnate geometry of the human figure. This combination of pure fragmentation and pure shape is, in some ways, the logical fulfillment of both sides of her vision of the world. The point is that we're seldom sure of what we're seeing. Revelation comes slowly. Nothing comes easy or at first glance, other than the impression that this is worth a second look. After that, we begin to see, and after that we realize that we have, in fact, only begun to see.
            And that, surely, is what Julian's work has been about, right from the beginning...and, one might choose to believe, also right about, from the beginning.

Dr. Jerry Cullum, 2004

Dr. Cullum is Senior Editor of the Atlanta-based magazine Art Papers. His essays and reviews have appeared is Sculpture, Assemblage, Artnews, and other journals of art and cultural criticism.