residency – Flower City Arts Center

A Conversation with Julia J. Wolfe

Julia J. Wolfe is a multidisciplinary artist based in Rochester, NY. Her work has been exhibited nationally and published in Studio Visit Magazine and New American Paintings. Through painting, drawing, printmaking, knitting, sculpture, writing, and installation, her practice reflects upon themes of childhood and times of innocence, alongside the shared human experience of growth.

Julia has been an artist-in-residence in Printmaking & Book Arts since September 2022. We recently sat down with her in the Book Arts Studio and chatted about her life, process, and time as a resident artist at Flower City Arts Center.

Can you talk about your artistic background and training?

Of course! I’ve loved drawing since I was a kid. Growing up, people would tell me that I was “good at drawing,” in the sense that they’d recognize whatever object or person I was trying to render realistically. It wasn’t until I took a drawing class in college (with the great Hamlett Dobbins!) that I decided to major in art. I went to Rhodes College in Memphis, TN and studied with some really wonderful faculty: Ben Butler, Hamlett Dobbins, Erin Harmon, and Laurel Sucsy. They all challenged me to think about what I was making, in ways I didn’t realize could be applied to art (before that, I just wanted to make pretty pictures). At Rhodes, I got into abstract painting, which I wasn’t expecting. From there, I did a post-baccalaureate program at Brandeis University to continue my studio practice and eventually apply to graduate school. At Brandeis, I studied under Sonia Almeida, Graham Campbell, Sean Downey, and many others, all of whom pushed my practice and paintings even further. I moved to Iowa City in the summer of 2015 to get my M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing at the University of Iowa. While at Iowa, I took a variety of classes, from printmaking to scene design to papermaking to sculpture and more. Naturally, this guided me into the world of installation, which I’ve found to be the most exciting and challenging way to exhibit my work. I gotta mention some more amazing teachers real quick: Isabel Barbuzza, Andrew Casto, Terry Conrad, T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, Susan Chrysler White. There’s a lot more people, but I should probably leave it there for now.

What brought you to Rochester?

Well, if you know anything about how a medical student becomes a resident doctor (the next step of medical training), then you know how random the “match” process can feel. Essentially, an applicant ranks the institutions where they interviewed while the institutions also rank the applicants. My husband was in medical school at Iowa, he made his rank list, I made my rank list of the cities where he interviewed, and then he matched at URMC – so we moved here!

Can you describe your creative process?

I always have a few things ongoing: a sketchbook (usually more than one at a time), drawings and prints, several paintings, sculptural pieces, various lists, and something I call my “Whisper Journal.” The Whisper Journal is a list of words and phrases that I’ve heard and have felt compelled to write down, for whatever reason. I have a pocketbook dedicated to this, as well as a digital version in the Notes app on my phone. This is often where my titles come from, as well as some written pieces. The paintings often incorporate something from each of those modes of working, and I view the installations as being spatially encompassing versions of the paintings.

Can you talk about the role of the sketchbook in your creative process?

For me, the sketchbook is where anything and everything can be recorded. I try to carry one with me wherever I go, just in case there’s something that I need to come back to later on. (People in the medical field often find it odd when I pull out my sketchbook to draw something quickly – usually a blind contour of the bar we’re in – but then they see it and are surprised to find that the quirky artist might be onto something!) It’s for capturing a moment, something a phone camera can’t do in the same way. Everyone takes pictures constantly, including myself, and then those photos just get lost in the sea of other random photos. The physicality of the sketchbook is important to me – it’s interactive and has a real presence when I flip through pages from eight years ago.

In a residency program that gives you access to very specialized equipment (letterpress, papermaking, bookbinding, etc.) what are some ways that you have been experimenting with new techniques and tools throughout your time at Flower City Arts Center?

I hadn’t tried letterpress until starting this residency, and it was the first technique I wanted to try. I took a class with Rachel Oatridge, “Digital Ink: 21st Century Letterpress”, which was so exciting. I have a bit of experience in graphic design and have always wanted to turn something digital into the physical process of printmaking. Now that the Center is getting a laser engraver, I’m hoping to make my own typeface that I can use for future letterpress prints. During grad school, I also did some papermaking and bookbinding, and it’s been refreshing to have facilities that allow me to bring those techniques back into my practice and experiment within them.

Did your original artistic goals change or evolve throughout the residency? If so, in what ways?

Yeah, I came into the year with nothing super concrete in mind. Typically, it’s during the process of making a body of work that I figure out what it’s doing and where it’s going. One day, I hope to publish a book, and I’d like to incorporate some of the work that I’ve made during this residency: handmade paper, screenprints, poems, paintings, drawings, images of sculptural/installation work, and letterpress prints. As far as what this book is about, I’m still figuring that out!

Are there any specific projects or artworks that you created during the residency that you’re particularly proud of or excited about?

There was a day in February when I thought it would be interesting to try letterpress on canvas and then make a painting with whatever came of that. So I printed onto a few different pieces of canvas (with many helpful tips from Megan), sewed up some holes made by the Vandercook (oops), stretched it, painted a bit, screen-printed onto part of it, painted some more, and ended up with a fine painting.

After your exhibition at Flower City Arts Center in September, what’s next?

I’ve got a show at the Mercer Gallery at MCC in October, and the opening reception is Thursday 10/5 at 5pm – there’s also an artist talk at 4pm the same day. Hopefully people will come see the installation! It’s titled “We Like to Take the Long Way.”

AIR Introduction: Megan Magee Sullivan

Hello, I’m happy to introduce myself as the new Risograph Artist-in-Residence in Photography & Digital Arts at Flower City Arts Center. For the next 6 weeks I will be experimenting with the Risograph duplicator. As a producer of visual books, I’m excited to see how the Risograph will expand my ability to execute projects that involve images and text.

As an interdisciplinary artist who creates books and experimental video, I appreciate how the two relate as time-based media. I utilize elements of personal and collective history, erasure poetry, and materials gathered from various public and private archives to examine the constructs of religion, family, and memory.

I’m looking forward to using the Risograph to execute a book project over the next several weeks. I will keep you up to date on my progress through the blog and my instagram @maggiemagees.

www.meganmageesullivan.com

AIR Introduction: Megan Barrette

Hi everyone! I’m so thrilled to be here this summer as an Artist-In-Residence. I’d love to take this chance to introduce myself.

Nothing makes me feel more vulnerable than photography. Before it was my job, before it was my course of study, it was first my greatest means of connection. Not only was it a creative outlet, it quickly became something that made me feel like I was valuable in the eyes of other people. So much of my ego hinged on what I made that, when the time came to actually follow it, I became more fearful. School was difficult; I thought about quitting numerous times. Post-grad was even harder, trying to advocate for myself and my worth as an artist. But creating my own work outside an institution or installed structure is a different beast entirely. It’s so much easier to make my art in a vacuum. To show it to the family, friends and fellow artists that love me.

On sharing work, one of my closest friends reminded me of this recently:

I’ve had incredible, supportive friends echo sentiment to me the past few weeks. I am so grateful for this opportunity to be an Artist-in-Residence at Flower City Arts Center. It is nothing short of a dream come true. My goal here is to make something that is honest and that hopefully connects you and me.

Photography is usually my way of working through a recurring thought. I tend to find catharsis in the construction of metaphors that make the world feel less chaotic. I don’t know if life is truly as symbolic as the narrative I actively pursue to build or if I’m reading too much into it. But my mind tends to ruminate – to overthink, and I’m trying to find solace in making the details matter.

I love to live in the space between analog and digital. I often incorporate motion into my work as a means of experimentation and expression. The classes I will soon be teaching will be motion-based workshops!

During my residency, I’ll be working on developing imagery that explores the relationship between photography and memory. I’m really looking forward to the next couple of months here participating in this great community and making work alongside other artists. I’ll surely be sinking a lot of time into the Lighting Studio and new Digital Art Studio, so I hope to see you there!

And as She Came, She must Go

Endings.

It takes a great deal of grace and experience to learn how to make the most out of an ending.

Today is my final blog post as an Artist in Residence in the Photography and Digital Arts Department at the Flower City Arts Center.

The culmination of my year-long residency resulted in something I prayed for deeply and repeatedly but didn’t expect: stepping out as a performance artist.

My whole life I have been interested in movement. When I was three I refused to remove a tutu for three days straight. I wanted to be a ballerina. In my teens, I was an athlete using nutrition and exercise to sculpt my body and my endurance. In my twenties, I fell in love with yoga. I have always loved to dance and challenge my body to move, stretch, grind, and groove.

The artifacts of my residency–deeply researched and painstakingly curated photographs–are now being stored away until further notice. However, in the gallery space where they were on view during the month of April, they contributed to an enveloping feeling of transformation.

I make art for my mental well being because I must. Yet the truly fulfilling experience is the impact my art has on my audience. The feedback I receive about personal insights, inspirations, and transformations from people interacting with my work fuels my soul. I am grateful to have received a healthy dose of uplifting feedback from the Rochester community. This reveals to me a community ready for a transfusion of new feminine archetypal energy.

The work pushed me. My choice to do a performance haunted me. I had to show up for myself in ways I had never done before–push myself along and over edges that scared the heck out of me. The reality of the performance caused such fear to rise up in my bowels that I asked myself frequently, “why did I do this to myself!?”

I did it because I must. Because I am unsatisfied with a life of status quos, mediocrity, and normalcy. I crave the depths, connection, transformation, inner purpose, beauty, connection, healing, joy, sorrow, expression, recognition. I am grateful to myself, to my guides, to my mentors and friends, and to Megan Charland who had faith in my vision. So, I built an altar and sanctified a space for transformation to take place, within me and within the other, in unison.

Now What?

A tiresome question for an artist at the apex of a big project.

It is an abrupt sort of question to receive right at the level of commencement or just following.

My response: Let’s just be present a while in what is currently surrounding us or what has just emerged. I anointed myself in my own menstrual blood and buried myself in a mound of dirt. What follows is a psychological grace period where I slowly integrate the power of my actions and take long naps.

There is a practice of staying indoors with a newborn baby for 40 days just the following birth. This second gestational period post birth allows the child’s nervous system to fully settle. The kundalini teachings say that after this time if taken in rest and connection with the parents, the child is set for life with a healthy nervous system.

Who does this? In a fast-paced world that demands much of us, most newborns are in car seats, whizzing around the world to social gatherings, before they are a week old. I have thought of this practice often in the time following my performance, feeling deeply renewed and unknown even to myself as I reconfigure who I am and what I am capable of.

You will be able to find me at the Flower City Arts Center through the Spring for a number of elementally charged classes. You will also be able to find me at The Yards throughout June as one of six artists in residence in their summer program. I am looking forward to deepening my commitment to ritual and movement practice, building community, and producing more experiences to evaluate and enjoy our aliveness in.

Body Autonomy and Femininity

What does it look like for a woman to have agency over her body? What does sexual sovereignty look and feel like in the bedroom and on the street? What sort of relationships evolve with self, soul, body and other when a woman stops seeing her body as a vessel of god’s will and a vessel of her own free thinking, powered by the divine creative principle?

When we begin to re-imagine the feminine in its entirety, and femininity as a powerful expression of sensuality and creation, a healing takes place within our minds, identities, and communities.

Throughout my residency, I have used the camera within my domicile and in the studio to catalog an ongoing inquiry of my relationship to sensuality, intimacy, sexuality, performance of femininity and expression of empowered feminine principles. I have worked with significant feminine archetypes, costume, lighting, set design and movement to navigate feelings of isolation, desire, morality, and internalized oppression whereas my body has been the subject of considerable collective sexual objectification throughout my life. As I reflect on my time at the Flower City Arts Center I recognize how much I continue to hold myself back in expressing my body, and my work, as my own. Too often, I seek external permission to be transgressive as a means of cultural transformation.

I recognize I am taking part in the cultural changes currently underway. Yet, I am still finding my voice, learning how to amplify it in an ocean of wisdom that continues to build momentum against systemic oppression of the feminine, nature and a queer, inclusive future. This is to say there is work to do, and I am here to do it. My mission at this moment is to come into more clarity, synthesis, and efficacy in implementing my vision, my philosophy and my dharma in the world. I am here to be a leader, a cultural change agent, and it is my commitment to be very good at it.

Myths of the Sacred Wound opens Saturday, April 6th-27th. Opening Reception from 5-8pm Saturday, April 6th. Live Performance at 7:22 pm.

Failure is Not an Option

Bad News.

I sent my 4×5 Portra 160 film and one roll of Portra 400 120mm film from the last three studio sessions I have done with the hopeful anticipation of getting back some beautiful images. I was going to take these large format film sheets and make composite images for my final prints for my show opening April 6th.

One-for-one, the 4×5’s were unexposed. The questions that arise here are:

WHY? WHAT HAPPENED?

We used the meter and set up the lighting. Yes, the lens cap was off,. Yes, slides had been removed. We even used my digital camera to set our exposure and aperture to get a good idea of out lighting situation. Likely, they’d be a little underexposed, but since I’d be scanning and digitally printing I had some room for error. I could always bring up the exposure in photoshop.

But something, somewhere, at some point, got lost in translation.

Edgar at Praus couldn’t figure why. Megan Charland promised it would drive her mad until she figured out what could have happened; she’s reaching out to fellow film heads to get some answers. Louis Chavez was incredulous.

Personally, I had to take a moment to just allow the disappointment to sink in. There is heartbreak here. It’s sort of the worst case scenario when it comes to film development; your film doesn’t turn out or is ruined at some point in the development process.

I watched. I breathed. I bathed.

Then, I made dinner. And in the middle of making dinner, surrounded by potential turmoil and the churning of a New Moon in Pisces, Mercury stationing Retrograde and this unfortunate failure, I had a resolve.

This is a test. A test of my resilience, my creative perspective. A test of surrender, problem solving and determination. I wasn’t gonna get caught up in a failure spiral. Instead, I was going to be a f*$king bad a$$ and turn this all into creative potential immediately.

I wrote a blog post for my Creative Cycles Mentorship page (here). And I decided to focus on what WAS working and what I had to work with.

Good News.

The 120mm film that Louis Chavez shot for me turned out great. I have also used my digital camera as a back up in every one of my sessions to ensure there was some form of an image to work with. You know, just in case the film sucked or turned out poorly.

I have time, resources and community support to work my final images into something beautiful, profound and important. I have time after my show to reshoot in film if I so desire (which I do).

My resolve was to understand and accept that a failure within a process is not a reflection of my identity. I failed, but I am not a failure. The failure is an opportunity to learn, grow and develop my character, my creative ingenuity and my problem-solving skills.

This failure gives me an opportunity to ask the images what they want and need from me and how I can be in service to their final expression rather than take a controlling and perfectionist driven position.

Surrender, allow flow.

My resolve was to focus on what WAS working and what I DID have rather than drowned in the despair of what wasn’t available and what didn’t turn out.

Isn’t that such an important lesson for life situations?! True creative mastery and flow evolve from focusing on what is right in front of you, giving attention to what is working and allow THAT to drive you forward into the next stage of success.