JULIE WEBER (Chicago IL, USA)
Biography:
Julie Weber completed her MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago (2014). Select solo exhibitions include Dark Adaptation, Bert Green Fine Art, Chicago (2017) and Light Chronology, For The Thundercloud Generation, Chicago (2016). Select group exhibitions include Pushed Processes: Reworking the Photographic Medium, Hokin Gallery, Chicago (2018); Shadow Fixation, Perspective Gallery, Evanston (2018); Extra Sensory: Process and Photography, Perspectives Gallery at Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Milwaukee (2017); Materials & Processes: Imaging the Elements of Photography, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh (2016); Century Safe, Roman Susan, Chicago (2016); Framed Occurrences, O’Connor Gallery at Dominican University, River Forest (2016); The Dissemination of Blind Light, Chicago Artists Coalition, Chicago (2015); Radiance, Woman Made Gallery, Chicago (2015); Ground Floor Biennial, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2014). Weber was an artist-in-residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition (2015). Papersafe, The Hand Magazine, and ArtAscent have featured Weber’s work in printed publications. Her limited-edition photobook, REMNANTS, was published by Skylark Editions (2017).
Artist Statement:
I worked in a one-hour photo processing lab in the early 2000s when vernacular photography was experiencing a monumental shift from film to digital processes. Fascinated by the lab’s first dye-sublimation printer, I kept the scrap material from the photographs I processed. I created the imagery for REMNANTS (re: book submission) by layering, folding, cutting and creasing this material byproduct into new configurations that illustrate the CMY color model and obscure the degree of visibility of the original image. Before allocating the original pieces of the printer byproduct to the special edition copies of REMNANTS, I created a series of 12 geometric and layered photograms by reconfiguring the pieces that made the 12 composite pages of the book. The photograms are a transformation of CMY digital process into black and white analog process.
Practice Statement: How does photographing on film (or using your material photographic process of predilection) inform your artistic practice?
Julie Weber is a visual artist working conceptually within the framework of photography. Weber is interested in how images take form and materialize into physical objects. Predominantly cameraless, her work considers how materials can image themselves by depicting their own process. Through methodical application of color, shape, layering, and repetition, material and process are pulled to the fore where they are inseparable from subject matter. Photography’s documental yet ephemeral nature, its simultaneous presence as both image and object, and its changeable relation to perceptibility are core tenets of her work. Weber’s practice does not seek to resolve these dualities but rather perpetuate their tension.
