About me
Julia Blume is a New York based sculptor, painter, and writer. She received her MFA from SFAI in 2018, after earning her BA and MA in linguistics from Columbia University and UC San Diego. In 2023, she opened her solo show, The Walled Garden, at The Front (NYC), and her two person show, as long as you want at My Pet Ram (NYC). Recent group shows include Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, Mizuma & Kips, RSOAA, Field Projects, Paradice Palase, and Established Gallery. She has participated in residencies with Signal Fire, ChaNorth, and ArtsIceland, and she was a fellow in Tania Bruguera’s Escuela de Arte Útil. She was a finalist for the Hopper Prize, and her work has been featured in Two Coats of Paint, Create! Magazine, Youngspace, Bat City Review, Friend of the Artist, and more.
Through sculpture, painting, and narrative, Julia Blume imagines a world where plants and more-than-human animals conspire to break down the onto-theological dichotomies of life/matter, artificial/natural, inside/outside, and human/animal.
In her paintings, trickster animals act as guides. Glyphs in the background come from Blume’s private lexicon of observed communication events, which she uses to take notes of how humans, other animals, plants, and landscapes are interacting with each other. Representational images of animals cavort among semi-abstracted forms drawn from cave paintings. These forms reference specific messages from the pictured animals, and Blume imagines the animals using these messages to communicate across species. In her most recent bodies of work, these trickster animals whisper messages of liberation to highly cultivated plants.
In Blume’s sculptures, plants that have been cultivated by humans for economic and agricultural reasons learn from the trickster animals to communicate in novel ways. They then come together to create sinuous, lumpy, symbiotic collectives which reflect their self-determination. Net-like forms reference roots weaving through cracks in walls and tearing them down, and tuber-like forms suggest loci of plant interaction and communication. These organic forms are intentionally created from highly processed materials, leading the viewer to question the false dichotomy of “natural” and “artificial”.