top of page

Julie Curtiss
---

precise and unsettling beauty

The beauty in the confrontation between reality and fantasy forces of a surrealist painting is attracting me. Julie Curtiss's artworks are a significant example to show the beauty of surrealism. Even though we can't see a portrait in her works, her painting still can expos and rework female archetypes through a surrealist sense of the uncanny. Thus, I believe that facial feature is not the only way to help people show their character, identity and tell people their emotions. We can use a similar manner to Post-Impressionist painters. Mining a subject that can express our emotions from our daily life, representing its curious, small details in cropped and ambiguous, interweaving the general and specific in ways that are at once fantastical, precise and unsettling. Therefore, I explored different ways to create portraiture.

Like my work 'Gaze yourself', the ceramic part abstracts the facial features.  I was inspired by 'Schrödinger's cat'  which is a famous thought experiment was devised by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Every event is a branch point, in different branches of the universe that are equally real but cannot interact with each other. That's like the memory in the past and present stored in a portrait, gazes back at a place of belonging, revealing a distance, both temporal and spatial, that penetrates our experience of difference.

And in my final artwork, the action of the audience, video-ed in real-time by a camera, is projected in technologically enhanced colour onto a painted canvas of disembodied body parts and anonymous portraits. So the audience, representing current, lived experience, overlays the painted sea of shifting, fragmented memories and imaginations. Here memory and real-time merge and the audience become part of the art creation. Interaction of artist, 'sitter' and audience, traditional and contemporary art technologies, and between past and present is created.

No place like home, 2017. Acrylic and oil on panel, 24″X36″.

curtiss8_1_orig.jpeg

D’apres l’origine du monde, 2016. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 23”X28”

E55EBF91-E728-4108-986A-378D1362CF59.JPG
DA9DAA48-F6DC-4FE2-91BC-4D6055C60303.JPG
33F8D859-C961-4660-B4E5-BC2FFFBBD54F.JPG

Gaze yourself  ceramic with oil painting, Jiaxi Duan, 40*40cm,  2021

Beyond scared

170 x 150 cm, Mixed media: Acrylic paint and oil paint, programming algorithms 

I collaborated with interaction designer GriffinKoo, creating a programming language by MAX/MSP software program and then projected it on my painting. The movements and sounds of the audience, through the programme, generate changes and shifts in the quality and colour of the images projected. 

bottom of page