Artwork by Julie AngelaTheresa
Opening Reception: June 08th , 2019.

Closing Reception: June 29th , 2019

AnuCompany on May 31st, 2019

Artist Statement:
Years ago I bought and moved into the house my Grandparents use to live in. The garage and basement were still filled with some of their things. It had been decades since either of them lived there, and in that time my mother had rented out the house to various people, but I was still able to find my grandparents possessions after all of those years. It was a very special house for me.
My first memories were from inside that house. I remember when I was about 7 or 8 months old and my mother and I were visiting my grandmother. We were in the living room and my grandmother left briefly and returned with a pink Pampers box full of toys. I remember crawling in and emptying all of the toys out. Years later after my grandparents were gone I remember playing with some of those same toys during a bath. I must have been about 6 or 7, and still clearly remember the same yellow duck and purple star from the Pampers box and the tub. How different would my memories be if those toys were thrown away when my grandmother died?
Since moving into the house, I have discovered some treasures. I found rusty old objects that look like they have been used year after year. There was a wheel barrel in the back yard and a handmade chain that were covered in rust, but how many stories did they hold? These objects are bridges to our past.
Nowadays most objects are routinely used, abused, and discarded. In today’s disposable society, where everything is old 5 minutes after you buy it, and the 3 R’s of reading, writing and arithmetic have been replaced with reduce, reuse and recycle, everything is used once and either thrown into a trash can or recycling bin. Nothing is ever held onto, and appreciated. My newest paintings were made with a hope that (among other things) people will begin to see the beauty in the old and discarded.
Objects are presented either alone on a canvas or showing a magnification of a small corner of life. In some you see a lone rusty bucket, or a crumpled piece of paper, or a tossed aside thumb tact. In others you see a broken concrete floor littered with trash, or an old scratched and stained wood flooring meeting crumbling concrete flooring, or a crumbling brick wall.
They all have one thing in common, though – the perspective. A straight-on close-up view – either looking straight down, or out. They are singular objects, seen head on, from a one point perspective. There is no far off background, no foreground, nothing to distract you, the viewer, from the object. The space around the object is bright and flat, to contrast the rust, dirt, and grime depicted on the object. There is nowhere else to look and the viewer is forced to see what I want them to. It is just one perspective, a flat surface. I feel that this forces the observer to concentrate on the subject matter, and only the subject matter. To not get bogged down with multiple perspectives, angles, horizon lines, or anything else that could get in the way. This also ensures that the focus of the painting will be on the object, the joining together of the two pieces, or the merging of surfaces, nothing else.