Body of Land

Julia Becker

Paris gibson square museum of art, Great Falls, MT

August 1 – November 1, 2021

Curatorial statement

Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art invites Julia Becker, a multimedia artist, and Professor of Fine Art at University of Providence in Great Falls, Montana, to create a multi-layered experience which participates in and responds to Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss, a cross-border multimedia environmental intervention. 

 
Julia Becker, Untitled, 2020, Original watercolor and gouache on paper, 10 x 14 inches

Julia Becker, Untitled, 2020, Original watercolor and gouache on paper, 10 x 14 inches

 

In Body of Land, Julia Becker maps out the bodily experience within the landscape. Her work is informed by research in topography, neurology, ecology, and is focused on the impact industry has on the land we live on and the bodies we live in. By incorporating information from the space/place she occupies, she uses her contemporary lens to observe, document, and critique human existence and dependence on the earth. Her work is conceived of in tandem with research, site-specific body rituals, and pictures created within her handmade books. Each process informs the next resulting in works of art that are different yet conceptually related to one another. This is made evident in Becker’s drawings which she transforms into digital neon landscapes that depict vibrating toxic landscapes and are critical of the history, place, and people in the scene. Conversely, and in response to her research, she moves outdoors and performs site-specific rituals with body movement and spoken word. In performing these ritualized movements, she seeks to engage and respond to a particular place or space, and offer the opportunity for transformation of energy, cleansing and healing.    Each act in the process of research, imagining, artmaking and ritual, becomes an important metaphor for Becker, and that is artist as witness, seer, and healer.

The physical exhibition will show the result of Becker’s body work for her Body of Land project. Video documentation of her body ritual movements, which are site driven, will be incorporated into an installation in the gallery space with the inclusion of Becker’s digital images, artist books, and paintings/monoprints.  Her process, rituals, and collaborations will  begin in Spring and continue throughout Summer of 2021 culminating in a multi-media exhibition, Body of Land, slated to open on August 1, 2021. 

As a 63-year-old, I trust my process, my deep knowing, my life experience and inclinations.  When the Extraction project was brought to my attention, I was inspired to look through decades of work considering the concepts presented and found this vein deep in my life’s work.  Having grown up next to what is now a Superfund site, a chemical dump in the middle of Cincinnati, and our family farm where I indulged in quiet time within nature, I was aware of conflicts manmade and natural as a young child.  Eventually, I traveled the world with open eyes, taking it all in, and working jobs at the interface (wildlands fire fighter, gardener/farmer, wilderness ranger and trail crew, landscaper for a company who did mine restoration).  As a youngster, I made my way to Montana after hiking the Appalachian trail from Virginia to Maine and in desperate need for a long solo walk, in nature, to experience deep Wilderness.  Eventually I worked for the Bureau of Land Management and the United States Forest Service in the Wilderness. I did this after studying wilderness ecology in Missoula in the late 1970’s with amazing professors in an interdisciplinary program “Wilderness and Civilization”. Through my many pursuits, I continued to write poetry and create art every day as that has always been my nature.  

Body of Land, will involve an inquiry into the local landscape where industry happens, people live, and wild nature convene. The great Missouri River and the ancient cottonwoods that stand in its pathway; the dams and their effects on currents, flow, animal life and migration, health and safety; the toxic dumps and history of dumping into our water veins and arteries; abandoned structures of past exploitation and ravishes of the topography; power lines across every rise of land stirring images of Golgotha.  The skeletons and bones of the land.   

HERE (Place/Pulse ~ Space/Impulse), 2020, Spoken Word improvisational movement piece, Black and white video still

HERE (Place/Pulse ~ Space/Impulse), 2020, Spoken Word improvisational movement piece, Black and white video still

This journey, this invitation, began with movement, as I considered the extraction industry and mindset.  This took me to the river, between the dams, where we live.  Here the Healing Ritual began.  I envision a series of embodiment inquiries at specific sites.  These start solo, and welcome others.  There are soundings, there are words, there are poems recited.  There are sounds of bodies, birds, sirens, cars, river and instruments.  There will be the passing of poems to be felt and vibrated through the body (read) by many.  And there will be images.  Some will be made with brushes dipped in paint, or hand-printed, and drawn and painted more, and scanned and digitally-played-with, and printed, and painted/drawn on more….  These images may work in generations as they continue to evolve, sometimes layering and weaving. 

My current work of the last 10- 15 years includes an inquiry I call Neurotopography.   My love of maps and mapping, my experience hiking and surveying large expanses of mountainous lands, and traveling to unknown places on foot, my study of neurology especially in relation to my daughter who lives with complex neurological phenomena, and my obsession with drawing and image-making... this and more informs my inquiry and ongoing body of work that I call Compositions in Neurotopography.  Within this study are my Industrial Landscapes that also personally signify the human cell, or the way it feels to be a human in this environment.  Often, I use the human form to ‘map’ the world, the rivers and mountains, the surges and flows, the transitory and ever evolving and changing landscape of time.  Here we find all the wars and ravages, all the ever-perpetuating life forms and evolutions/transformations.   For me, this is the way I feel, so it is natural to paint the human form as so.  For we are essentially one living life form, from every cell and atom to the contained planet to the cosmos.  

We are a verb, in process.  We are porous, breathing and pulsing as one in time. We take care of each other. We consume and destroy each other.   We bleed into and breathe as one.  Our cells communicate more than we have the ability to understand.  Our minds determine and inhibit.  When I move out of my mind, I sense and know more.   Through body movement explorations, through ritual and ceremony, through improvisation and allowing words and images to happen, through deep presence, through giving over and letting go, and through BEING the physical being I am ... the work manifests and takes me on the journey. 

—Julia Becker

Silent Scream, 2018, Monoprint, Acrylic and ink on Yupo paper, 20 x 26 inches

Silent Scream, 2018, Monoprint, Acrylic and ink on Yupo paper, 20 x 26 inches

Agriculture and War, 2016 -2018, Digital Manipulation, Printed in various sizes, Image taken from artist’s original watercolor/drawing, 20 x 15 inches, Hardback codex book on Rives BFK paper.

Agriculture and War, 2016 -2018, Digital Manipulation, Printed in various sizes, Image taken from artist’s original watercolor/drawing, 20 x 15 inches, Hardback codex book on Rives BFK paper.

This exhibition is presented by Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art (The Square), and curated by Nicole Maria Evans, Curator of Art. Exhibitions at The Square are supported in part by the Montana Arts Council a state agency funded by the State of Montana, Humanities Montana, National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor, and National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding is provided by museum members and the citizens of Cascade County, and generous support from the Davidson Foundation, Montana Credit Union, and D.A. Davidson. With special sponsorship from Montana Woman Magazine.

Emergency Shelter, 2016-2018, Digital Manipulation, Printed in various sizes, Image taken from artist’s original mixed media watercolor/drawing, 20 x 15 inches, Hardback codex book on Rives BFK paper.

Emergency Shelter, 2016-2018, Digital Manipulation, Printed in various sizes, Image taken from artist’s original mixed media watercolor/drawing, 20 x 15 inches, Hardback codex book on Rives BFK paper.

Great Falsetto, 2016, Digital Collage. Printed in various sizes. Layered images taken from artist’s original watercolor drawings and other digital images.

Great Falsetto, 2016, Digital Collage. Printed in various sizes. Layered images taken from artist’s original watercolor drawings and other digital images.


 
 

Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art
1400 First Avenue North
Great Falls, MT 59401