SOFAM kicks off “Visiting Artist & Speaker” series
On Monday, Jan. 27, the School of Fine Arts and Music (SOFAM) presented the first of its “Visiting Artist & Speaker” series of Winter 2014, featuring Julia Dault, a Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based artist. In a small lecture room in Alexander Hall, Dault spoke to a crowd of like-minded people from the local arts community (including artists, professors, and students) about her artistic practice as a sculptor and abstract painter.
Dault’s artistic practice is bolstered by her well-developed critical background: she holds a BA in Art History from McGill University and an MFA from Parsons, and she has also worked as an art critic for the National Post. Dault’s work as a critic informs her work as an artist. She has honed her practice in part through immersing herself in the contemporary art scene, which allowed her to develop a nuanced understanding of art criticism before taking the leap to go public with her own work. As a speaker, Dault was precise and articulate in sharing insights into her own practice.
She admitted to being drawn to a minimalist aesthetic in her sculptural work. Her sculptures consist of sheets of industrial materials, such as Plexiglass and Formica, which are bent, layered, and curved in semi-cylindrical forms, and then stacked and pinned – sometimes precariously – to the gallery wall in a labour-intensive process.
Dault spoke of the idea of “anti-illusionism,” a response to a trend in contemporary art that requires the viewer to look outside of the artwork – often to textual sources – to fully grasp the meaning of the work. Dault’s sculptures counter this tendency towards obscurity.
“What would it mean to create a work that was self evident – that contained all the information that you needed to know, in and of itself, in that form, and you wouldn’t have to rely on some sort of external information to derive full meaning?” Dault asked.
Following a strict self-imposed production mandate, Dault adheres to a set of pre-determined rules that regulate how materials can be used. She won’t cut, glue, warp or pre-bend the sheets prior to installation. The assembly of the pieces happens on-site, within the gallery space. Thus, the integrity of the material is kept intact, yet is also challenged and contested as she physically bends and manipulates materials to create novel forms.
She has sometimes been described as a “performative sculptor” due to the very physical encounter with the tangible object. “It’s me in the space, confronting these materials, and wrangling them into a form, and tying them and anchoring them in place. Because you can see that: you can see the knots, you can see the tethers, and understand how the form came to be,” said Dault.
Dault also discussed her abstract painting practice, and her experimental use of unconventional tools such as combs, or ad-hoc items as brushes. Her painting, she explained, is a “meditation” on the mark-making practice.
“One of the reasons I use tools is both to kind of expand a gestural vocabulary, and also because a tool, in my mind, allows for a kind of anti-illusionism. If you have a tool, there’s a way to trace what mark was made first, a way to kind of see the choreography of the maker across the surface, and that to me was really important,” said Dault.
Dault looks to the world around her for inspiration. Mundane observations – from titles borrowed from cultural references to found colour combinations – can form the inspiration for an abstract painting, and the results are often playful and inventive. Abstraction, Dault suggested, doesn’t always have to aspire to the sublime, the poetic, or the philosophical; it can draw inspiration from the everyday, and the results can be equally captivating.
Upcoming artist talks include Public Studio (Elle Flanders and Tamira Swatzky) on Feb. 10, Marla Hlady on March 10, the Shenkman Lecture featuring Roberta Smith on March 19, and Sky Glabush on March 24.