Julia Kerley

Instagram: @earthtriplet

Website: https://juliakerley.cargo.site

Bio: Julia Kerley (Los Angeles, CA) is an artist who primarily makes ceramic sculptures and installations. Working in the modality of clay is a uniquely formative experience for herself and the earth she graciously works with–an experience rife with transmutation and alchemy. She constructs heavily textured, modular ceramic sculptures based on historic, often religious or ritualistic, references. The resulting objects represent experiments in the invention of self and the complexity of an identity shaped by memory.

Statement: Through this queering of the boundary where self ends and object begins, she re-creates these ritual objects in service of a re-imagined history–one rich in multiplicity of gender, class, sexuality, and cultural background. The objects thereafter embark on their journey of selfhood, somewhere suspended between life and death, objecthood and selfhood, now positioned in the empowerment of their history. Each work also contains an element of performance. The interaction between artwork and audience extends the meaning of the work beyond the artist, and situates these glitched historic vessels within other people and into the occasion of now. Kerley’s Capture study unfolds and expands non-linearly; structure and outcome co-evolve through her contingent thinking and activity. She analyzes CAPTCHAs' philosophical, technological, and socio-political implications within a digital and textile matrix. Ideas of control, labor, security, and identity surround the basis of the work in relation to matrixial theory and Glitch Feminism, creating a handwoven topographical textile aimed at understanding the expansiveness of the cyber and physical world.