Julia Bland by Maya Frodeman Gallery

ADRIAN NIVOLA JULIA BL AND

14 DECEMBER 2023 — 04 FEBRUARY 2024

JULIA BL AND EMBERS

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

A L L PAT H WAY S L E A D TO H E R E A N D N OW

Whatever else may be happening in Julia Bland’s works – and a lot always is – this is what they’re telling you. Long in the making, they nonetheless exist in a state of heightened presentness. Multiple intelligences meet, in these emblems of convergence. The vectors that criss-cross the compositions, arriving as if from the great beyond, find correspondence in the very means she uses to summon them: painting, textile, drawing and mathematics, all tied together, such that they cannot be disentangled. Bland is achieving a sublime synchronicity, making works that are simultaneous, somehow, with themselves. Does this all sound a bit mystical? If so, you’re not wrong. Bland is a contemporary exponent of a longstanding visionary tradition, in which the luminous names of Hilma Af Klint, Lenore Tawney, and Agnes Martin might be invoked. She grew up exposed to multiple religious traditions – her mother is Jewish, her father a Presbyterian minister – and she has since pursued the study of Sufism, the Islamic religious practice. Early in her career, after training as a painter at RISD and before learning to weave, she spent time in Morocco. She absorbed the dense concentrations of pattern in people’s homes there, and for a time apprenticed herself to a carver of intricately decorated wooden doors. This saturation in craft reinforced experiences she’d had growing up in Palo Alto, California, where she had her first exposures to art through family friends who probably would qualify as flower children. One of them taught her how to make jewelry, and another gave her a loom that she still uses today. Her parents, meanwhile, though not artists themselves, were well tuned-in to the currents of thought then animating America’s left coast. Bland’s mother conscientiously objected to her own science degree at Stanford, switching to music history in order to “avoid being part of the military industrial complex.” Her father co3

founded the Center for International Conflict and Negotiation at Stanford University. Bland recalls, “I grew up listening to my dad and his colleagues who were philosophers, social psychologists and political scientists discussing the conflict in Northern Ireland, which at the time was considered unsolvable. I also grew up listening to stories from people who lived those conflicts, and frequently shared the dinner table with people from both sides.” This upbringing left her with a deep awareness of how difficult that project really is. Bland has been splitting the difference between utopianism and pragmatism ever since. It is no simple matter: the presence of her work, blazing with futurity but also an overwhelming, materially intense all-at-onceness, is accomplished only through elaborate calculation. One recent work, entitled Sharp Edge of the Sky (see page 5, opposite), began with a textile that she had woven by hand, then dyed in a distinctive shade of fuchsia. It was certainly vivid – maybe too vivid, she thought. Then she began to work with it. Having modulated into a higher chromatic key than her usual, she found herself extending her palette beyond its usual confines, going for acid yellow, salmon pink, and lurid green. The total effect is electrifying. Standing before the immense wall hanging, you are enmeshed in the internal oscillations of its “active surface” (to borrow a term from Op Art). The composition, while essentially symmetrical, is laced with tactical misalignments. Colors are usually reflected from one side to the other, but here and there, they shift unexpectedly. The work has the dynamic balance of a yin yang symbol, as if seen through a kaleidoscope. Picked out in blue, amidst it all, are two motifs: a rounded pillar on the left half of the composition, and on the right, a teardrop shape, which could be trickling down from the eye-like form above – though that could also be read as the rim of a tapered wineglass. These multiple, elusive images are compacted within the pictorial 4

field, much like the numerals in Jasper Johns’ celebrated 0 Through 9 series: a palimpsest of layers, with none taking precedence.

Sharp Edge of the Sky also incorporates passages of tie-dye, a technique that alludes to 1960s stain painting, but is more indelibly and inevitably associated with that era’s hippie counterculture. Bland is an unapologetic inheritor of that legacy, and actively cultivates its energies. Several of her recent works prominently feature the iconography of the moon, that paradigmatic symbol of witchy, alternative feminism. The impulse to do so even came to her in an actual dream. At the same time – and this is typical of Bland’s way of having it all – her earnest embrace of psychedelia and goddess worship is totally bound up with her rigorous, structural approach to abstraction. The yarn that she used for tie-dyeing, in Sharp Edge of the Sky , is the same gauge as those she used in its woven elements. This provides a consistent unit of measure, establishing a rhythm against which the work’s themes and variations play out. Similarly, the fringes that hang down from the lower edges of some of her compositions suggest an association with blankets and other everyday textiles. But as Bland observes, they also “give you information about how the work came together. There are the technical and formal aspects of the technique, and then there is the social naming of it.” Craft is typically encountered either as culturally- encoded, perhaps folkish, perhaps kitschy; conversely, it may be seen as a culturally-neutral modus operandi, simply a way of arriving at form. Bland refuses this false opposition. When she uses a technique, she takes on its full range of association and potential, absorbing it whole. This is the impulse that drives her forward. When I visited Bland in her studio, in early 2023, she was contending with a whole range of new variables. Her latest compositions had passages of negative space – what a lace-maker might call openwork – bridged 6

with painted strips of canvas, or passages of triangular lattice. Braided ropes, made of more painted canvas (“complex things in their own right,” as Bland notes), traverse each composition, at once describing a diagrammatic tracery and physically holding the whole thing together. She was also creating her first asymmetrical works, at smaller scale, at once airy and architectonic. Each one of these experiments, even the littlest and simplest of them, seems a world unto itself. Accumulated from years’ worth of technical research, historical reference, and aesthetic investigation, her works also feel almost scarily generative, implying countless ways forward. As much as she’s already done, Bland is always just getting going, discovering what the present tense can look like.

- Glenn Adamson

SLOW CAST, 2018 Linen and wool threads, canvas, fabric dye, oil paint, and wax 101 x 66 inches

LOVE IN THE ENDLESS NIGHT, 2020 Hand woven linen and wool textile, hand dyed linen, linen and wool threads, hand dyed blanket, wax, and oil paint 111 x 136 inches

HIGH NOON, 2022 Linen, cotton, and wool threads, canvas, fabric dye, and oil paint 95 x 57 inches

MIDNIGHT MORNING, 2016 Canvas, wool, linen threads, wax, fabric dye, oil paint, and ink 96 x 82 inches

RED MOON, 2019 Burnt canvas, hand woven textile, linen threads, oil paint, and wax 67 x 65 inches

SO BELOW, 2021 Handwoven linen and wool textile, hand felted wool, fabric dye, linen and wool threads, linen fabric, found denim, hand braided and dyed bead sheets, stainless steel 94 x 63 inches

LONG ALLIANCE, 2023 Oil and burnt canvas on panel 32 x 32 inches

FOUR THRESHOLDS, 2023 Oil and burnt canvas on panel 32 x 32 inches

SWELL, 2023 Oil and burnt canvas on panel 30 x 30 inches

DRAWING FOR “LOVE IN THE ENDLESS NIGHT” NO. 3, 2020 Ink on paper 5 1/16 x 8 3/16 inches

DRAWING FOR “LOVE IN THE ENDLESS NIGHT” NO. 4, 2020 Ink on paper 5 1/16 x 8 3/16 inches

DRAWING FOR “AT DAWN THE SHORE IN YOUR EYES”, 2020 Ink on paper 5 1/16 x 8 3/16 inches

DRAWING FOR “TREES”, 2021 Ink on paper 5 1/16 x 8 3/16 inches

DRAWING FOR “HIGH MOON”, 2022 Ink on paper 5 1/16 x 8 3/16 inches

DRAWING FOR “HALF MOON”, 2022 Ink on paper 5 1/16 x 8 3/16 inches

DRAWING FOR “THREE SUNS”, 2022 Ink on paper 5 1/16 x 8 3/16 inches

DRAWING FOR “SIX SPACES”, 2023 Ink on paper 5 1/16 x 8 3/16 inches

DRAWING FOR “MORNING SONG”, 2023 Ink on paper 5 1/16 x 8 3/16 inches

JULIA BLAND American, born in 1986 Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

EDUCATION 2013 2012 2008

Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME MFA, Yale University New Haven, CT (Painting and Printmaking) BFA, Rhode Island School of Design Providence, RI (Painting)

SOLO & TWO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS 2023 - 2024 Embers, Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY 2023 Little Infinity, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL 2022 Dream of Falling, Guesthouse Projects, Jackson, WY 2021 Some Love Holds Water, Derek Eller Gallery, NYC, NY 2020 Julia Bland & Michelle Segre, Derek Eller Gallery, New York 2019 The Half That Ties, The Half That Breaks, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL 2018 Ways To Cross, The Lighthouse Works, Fisher’s Island, NY Underbelly, Helena Anrather Gallery, NYC, NY 2017 The Armory Show, On Stellar Rays, NYC (2 person) Things To Say At Night, Miller Contemporary & Stellar Projects, New York, NY 2015 If You Want To Be Free, On Stellar Rays, NYC NY 2014 Hard as You Can, Right at the Middle, Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York, NY 2009 What’s It Mean Love To You?, Bab Boujeloud, The World Sacred Music Festival, Fez, Morocco

AWARDS AND RESIDENCIES 2020 2018 2017 2016 2015

NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship Macdowell Colony, Residency Shandanken: Storm King, Residency The Lighthouse Works, Residency Yaddo, Residency Milton and Sally Avery Fellow The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program 68

2014 2013 2012 2008

The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Emerging Artist Grant Nominee Woodstock Byrdcliff Colony, Residency The Pollock Krasner Fellow Yaddo, Residency Carol Scholsberg Memorial Prize for Excellence in Painting Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust Travel Fellowship Florence Leif Award for Excellence in Painting

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2023 Art Basel, Derek Eller Gallery, Miami Beach, FL Geotex: Geometric Abstraction in Textile Art, Curated by Liz Collins, Jeff Lincoln Art and Design, Southampton, NY 2022 Matter & Form, The Bunker Art Space, West Palm Beach, FL The Armory Show, Derek Eller Gallery, NYC, NY Now I am a Lake, curated by Rose Nestler, Public Gallery, London, UK Longing: Woven Strands, Woven Stories, The Swedish Institute in Paris Thaw: Winter Group Show, The Landing, Los Angeles, CA 2021 AbStranded, The Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY Art Basel, Derek Eller Gallery, Miami Beach, FL 2019 Even Thread Has Speech, Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI Nature as Measure, Curated by Candice Madey, Chambers, Beijing Four, Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC, NY 2018 Untitled Art Fair, Andrew Rafacz Gallery NADA, Helena Anrather Gallery, Miami Beach, FL Geometry, TSA, Philadelphia, PA Still Life, September Gallery, Hudson, NY 2017 A Thread Of Execution, Dimensions Variable, Miami, FL 2016 Persuasive Percussion, On Stellar Rays, New York, NY Intertwined, NYU Institute of Fine Arts, New York, NY Good Old New Place, Cuevas Tilleard Gallery, New York, NY The Tide Is High, The Silvermine Art Center, Governor’s Island, NY 2015 The Landscape Changes 30 Times, Anahita Gallery, Tehran, Iran 2014 NADA, On Stellar Rays, Miami Beach, FL Equations of Sight-Similarity, On Stellar Rays, New York, NY 2013 Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Industry City, New York, NY Breaking Night, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA 2012 Deep Cuts, Anna Kustera Gallery, New York, NY Centaurs and Satyrs, Asya Geisbergy Gallery, New York, NY Eyes Off The Flag, Koki Arts, Tokyo, Japan 69

BIBLIOGRAPHY Plasse, Tibby. “Panoramas, tapestries, and otherworldly explorations open at Tayloe Piggott Gallery” Jackson Hole News and Guide, Dec 13, 2023 Byng, Malaika, “The Commission” Crafts Magazine, March, 2022 Steinhauer, Jillian, “3 Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now”, New York Times, September 22, 2021 Rosaria Roseo, Maria, “Julia Bland” ArteMorbida 2021 Cohen, Alina. “9 Must-See Shows in New York This March” Artsy, March 3, 2020. Johnson, Paddy. “Lower East Side’s Best Art Exhibitions Bring Us Brave New Subgenres of Abstraction” NY Observer, February 27, 2020. Goldstein, Caroline. “Editors Picks: 11 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week” February 3, 2020. The Association of Professional Art Advisors. “25 Works under 25K” Frieze Magazine, May 6, 2020. Voon, Claire. “Julia Bland: The Half That Ties, The Half That Breaks” The Brooklyn Rail, November 2019. Stratton, Shannon. “Even Thread (Has) a Speech.” Lenore Tawney, Mirror of the Universe, edited by Karen Patterson and The John Michael Kohler Arts Center, University of Chicago Press, 2020. Wolkoff, Julia. “7 Artists Weaving New Tapestry Traditions” Artsy, June 13. 2019. Jorda, Eliza. “Our New Common Ground: The Uncommon Art Residency Program” Whitewall, March 26, 2019. Coscone, Sarah. “In The Studio with Julia Bland” artnet, December 6, 2018 Carrigan, Margaret. “From Snakes and White T-Shirts to Vinyl LP’s: 6 Artist Reveal the Good Luck Charms That Keep Them Inspired”, artnet, May 21, 2018 Yau, John. “When Paintings Are Stitched, Unstitched, Twisted, and Knotted” Hyperallergic, April 8, 2018 Schwendener, Martha. “What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week” The New York Times, October 18 2017 Phillips, Thavma, “Julia Bland, A Mixed Media Artist That Takes You On A Journey” Artefuse, October 24, 2017 Barcio, Phillip. “The Story of Abstract Textile Design” IdeelArt, March 10, 2017 Indrisek, Scott.“10 Must-See Booths at the Armory Show” Blouin Artinfo, March 3, 2017 Martin, Lucy. “The Armory Show Gallery Picks: Day One” ElephantMag, Mar 3, 2016 Montross, Sarah. “Northeast: Juror’s Selections” New American Paintings, Issue #122. Feb./Mar. 2016 Buhmann, Stephanie, ”Persuasive Percussion” The Villager, July, 2016 Beckenstein, Joyce. ”New York: Julia Bland-On Stellar Rays” Sculpture Magazine, April, 2016 ”Julia Bland: Reviews in Brief” Modern Painters, December, 2015 70

Wolkoff, Julia. ”Julia Bland” Art in America, December, 2015 Indrisek, Scott. “Julia Bland: 5 Must See Gallery Shows in New York” ArtInfo, October, 2015 ”Julia Bland: The Lookout”, Art in America, October, 2015 Ebony, David. “Julia Bland: David Ebony’s Top 10 New York Gallery Shows”, Artnet, September 2015 Halle, Howard. “Julia Bland: The top five New York art shows this week”, Time Out New York, September 2015 Kincheloe, Megan Liu. ”Julia Bland: Selected Shows Opening in New York”, ArtCritical, September 2015 Kaoru, Yanase. “Where To Go in The New York Art Scene: Visiting The New Mecca of Art in Bushwick”, Artscape.jp, February 1 2015 Gavin, Francesca. ”What not to miss at Art Basel Miami”, Dazed Digital, December 2014 Groth, Micahel. “NADA Miami Beach Keeps It Casual”, Hyperallergic, December, 2014 Mcpherson, Heather Leigh. “Miami, Part II: Heather Leigh Mcpherson Reports on NADA”, Two Coats of Paint, December, 2014 Hamer, Katy. “Check Out Miami’s Nada Fair”, Vulture, December, 2014 “Goings on About Town: Art, Equations of Sight-Similarity”, The New Yorker, February, 2014 Duray, Dan. ”Twelve Things to Do in New York’s Art World Before Jan 13”, The New York Observer/GalleristNy, January, 2014 Hedayya, Mostafa. “10 Artists to Watch from Bushwick Open Studios.” Hyperallergic, June 5, 2014 ”Equations of Sight-Similarity at On Stellar Rays, New York”, Mousse Magazine, January, 2014 Surface, Susan. “Textiles, Texture and Paint at 1717 Troutman”, Arts In Bushwick, June, 2014 Gorky’s Granddaughter, Artist Interview, October, 2012 Fisher, Jane. “Not Your Grandmother’s Art Show”, Out of Order Magazine, February, 2012

PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS Artist Portraits and Studio Images: Gregory Gentert Installation Images: Tuck Fauntleroy

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