Julia Dault

Tad Hozumi is a Vancouver-based artist and hip hop therapist, involved in local street dance culture and currently working on a body of photo, installation, social intervention and performance work that explores the history of struggle coded in to the subversive vocabulary of street style dances. Responding to the pop culture references of Julia Dault’s paintings he will curate a collection of records, and on June 6 and 13 he will conduct a series of participatory movement workshops building on his selections. On June 27 Hozumi will give a talk on the practice of crate digging (AKA record collecting) and play a live set.


Two abstract, black and white paintings and one sculpture are installed in a gallery space. The sculpture is made of large, arched and bent sheets of reflective material stacked atop one another. 

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Tad Hozumi

Talk

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition by Toronto-born, New York-based artist Julia Dault. Through a selection of new and recent works, the exhibition reveals the importance to Dault of balancing spontaneous gesture with responsiveness to rules, logic and the constraints of materials. Physical negotiations are central to Dault’s textured paintings and improvised sculptures; both are exhibited in *Blame It On the Rain*.

Dault is interested in “embodied knowledge” — how making is thinking — and reinserts the artist’s hand into a minimal aesthetic primarily interpreted as distanced and industrial. The artist’s rule-based painting involves responding to mass-produced elements — patterned silks, pleather, unmixed paint straight from the tube — with unconventional tools, such as squeegees, rubber combs and sea sponges. The limitations of these objects create quasi-standardized gestures that allow Dault to skirt the line between expressive abstraction and cool, machine-like facture. Erasure of her paintings’ topmost layers, which allows viewers to “see into” the painting process, is as important to Dault as paint application.

Exploration of artistic labour recurs in Dault’s sculptures. Always improvising on site and working alone, the artist manipulates and coerces Plexiglas, Formica and other industrially produced materials into imposing curved forms, then affixes them to the gallery wall using straps and cords. Dault’s efforts can be understood as “private performances” in which her physical capabilities are juxtaposed with the properties of the materials she employs. Each sculpture is titled with a time stamp that reflects the duration it took to complete the piece. In this gesture, as with her paintings, she hopes to underline the durational nature of the art-making process.

Dault’s work fuses the emphasis on process found in both Abstract Expressionist painting and post-Minimal sculpture. One unifying element is the artist’s fascination with patterns, and with the slippages and imperfections that reveal the human origins of what appears mechanical. Another is the search for variety within strict limitations. By devising expressive gestures through rules and reasoning indicative of post-Minimal and Conceptual art, Dault is part of a generation of artists acknowledging histories and legacies of art making while revitalizing abstraction today.

The exhibition complements *Color Me Badd*, presented at The Power Plant, Toronto in 2014-2015. 

### Biography

Julia Dault lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has held solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2015); The Power Plant, Toronto and China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles (2014); Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich and Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto (2013); and White Cube Bermondsey, London (2012). She has also participated in group shows which include: *Elevated*, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2014-2015), *Americana: Selections from the Collection*, Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2013–2014); *Outside the Lines*, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2013–2014); *In the Heart of the Country*, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; *Inner Journeys*, Maison Particulière, Brussels (2013); *The Ungovernables*, New Museum, New York; *Roundtable*, the Ninth Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2012); and *Making Is Thinking*, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2011). Her work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Saatchi Gallery, London; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Dault is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto; and China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles.




ProgramGuideSummer2015.pdf

A close up view of an abstracting painting. The painting is made up of a repeating pattern of mainly pink, blue, black, and white crescent moon-like shaped brushstrokes. 

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A large, rectangular sculpture resembling a marble plinth is installed in the middle of a gallery floor. Mounted on the dark blue wall behind are two, two-dimensional abstract artworks. 

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A hallway covered in mirrored panels leads into a bright gallery. A blue, abstract painting hangs on one hallway wall. A large-scale abstract painting is visible on a blue wall inside the gallery. 

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A blue, abstract painting is installed in a gallery hallway. Both walls are covered in mirrored panels, creating infinitely repeating reflections of the painting to recede into the mirrors opposite. 

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A large-scale painting is installed on a blue, free-standing wall. In light tones, abstract shapes and colours repeat across the canvas. Alternating blue and white rectangles frame the edge.

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Blame It On the Rain

This catalogue demonstrates Julia Dault’s ongoing interest in balancing spontaneous gesture with rules, logic and the constraints of materials.

Physical negotiations are central to the textured paintings and improvised sculptures for which Julia Dault is celebrated. In her multilayered paintings, Dault employs organic and synthetic supports such as canvas, leather, vinyl, spandex and wooden frames, which act as surfaces to hold paint or as a means of imposing patterns. Whether adding or subtracting paint from these materials, she uses unusual tools such as rubber combs and squeegees that standardise her gestures. Repetition and transparency are important to Dault; looked at closely, her paintings reveal the process of their creation.

Featuring essays by exhibition curators Julia Paoli and Nigel Prince, as well as a specially commissioned text, "Julia Dault" is an engaging and long overdue introduction to the artist and her work.

Published by the Contemporary Art Gallery in partnership with The Power Plant, Toronto and Black Dog Press.


Julia Dault

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