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Julia Jacquette’s “My Houses (View with Yacht)” is on display at the Pinnacle Gallery through Aug. 10.
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6/15/2007  Artist Julia Jacquette paints the visually delicious milieu of the extravagantly glamorous in “Desired,” showing at Pinnacle Gallery, 320 E. Liberty St., June 15-Aug. 10. Utilizing images from magazines and movies, Jacquette depicts a lifestyle she said she doesn’t live, but desires. “In my artwork I speak about desire, desire for a glamour that is, in fact, unattainable — the product of art directors and magazine editors. Yet the images I take from the media and depict in my work are undeniably appealing to me,” she said in her artist statement. “The artwork using food as imagery was my first exploration of this. Food seemed the perfect visual metaphor for [a] highly desirable object or person, and making images of food also always looked visually striking.” Using quotes from 1950s advertisements, she groups together images of people engaged in kitsch gestures, such as coifed women holding cigarettes or men gripping martinis. “The glamorization of these destructive vices is, for me, macabre,” she said. “Yet it is also visually delicious. Images from the 1950s are used for their iconographic quality. These outdated notions of how men and women should look and act still pervade our culture today, albeit in subtle ways, and despite tremendous changes in our culture.” Despite her awareness of these falsehoods, she is, ironically, completely seduced by them. Through her artistic techniques, however, she imposes order and form on the images. “My use of the grid in this work stems from my love of it as an organizing tool within the paintings and as a way to visually link them together. It’s my attempt to contain these highly sentimental images within a rigid framework,” said Jacquette. She also has created a series of white-on-white pieces, in which she extends her theme of imagery that is beautiful and oppressive. She has a cathartic experience with these works, exploring her feelings concerning typically female-driven industries. “By doing this I hope to lessen their power over me. The ‘White on White’ artworks are also my own hyper-feminine version of the classic white-on-white work of art,” said Jacquette. “A related issue has also emerged from this project: my own fascination with, and ambivalence [about], the bridal industry.” By combining the minimal and the embellished, Jacquette questions cultural and stereotypical notions about what is decorative and what is classified as feminine in nature. Her work continues to defy this classification through the application of paint on canvas. Article by By Ally Hughes
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