Thesis Exhibition: April 16 - 19, 2014

Opening Reception: Friday, April 18, 6 - 8:30pm

Chthonic forces underlie the art of Julia Bunn. Sensed on the edge of consciousness, we recognize them but don’t know why. They engage us in scrutinizing her pieces for what seems so comfortably familiar, yet so imperceptible, that it disturbs. Something of the transmutation, something metamorphic, something materially indeterminate pervades these figures, suggesting ceaseless fractals in the round, stilled for a moment of disquieting apprehension.

Disorder belies Julia’s systematic imprint. Her method balances the calculated and spontaneous structuring of elemental forms to develop labyrinths of interlaced loops and curves, provocatively sensuous shapes, and playfully emergent trans-figurations. Characterized sometimes by radial symmetry and sometimes by both monumental and diminutive proportions, nothing is haphazard. In everything willful, Julia synaesthetically seduces our eyes as we trace lines and note surface oppositions that invite the furtive touch.

Mastery of materiality empowers Julia’s artistry. Clay and polychrome glazes react to her hands and make their presence palpably, distinctively visible. So strong is her creative animus that it endows her art with life beyond herself, and links together an apparent disparity of sculpted formulations into a cogently cohesive body of articulated ideas.

Disciplined examination rewards the patient eye. Julia’s work thematizes the beauty of ambitiously-intricate compositions, mediates encounters at the boundary of our observant, conscious selves, and altogether embodies an aesthetic revealing the human sensorium’s potential to recognize as specious cognitively-dissonant dualisms like known/unknown, self/other, endogenous/exogenous. Unmistakably her own, the style, content, and intent of Julia Bunn synchronize into an art deeply rich in its powerful complexity.

-written by Bradley J. Cavallo