Magic in the mundane
Multimedia artist Julie Speed’s surreal gouache and collage paintings hint at more than they reveal through enigmatic imagery, conflations of historic artistic styles, and references culled from the field of time. But it isn’t nostalgia that draws the Marfa-based artist to the past. Under Speed’s hand, the history of art is a vehicle for exploring a contemporary vision of absurdity, one in which associations are abundant even if their meanings are elusive. Speed’s first solo show at Evoke Contemporary contains more than 50 of her pieces, including paintings, collage works, assemblages, and works on paper. The exhibition is on view through January. On the cover is Speed’s Kunisada’s Ghosts (detail), 2015, gouache and collage. 24
IN the gouache and collage paintings of multimedia artist Julie Speed, inanity and folly interrupt the mundane, heightening the drama of otherwise unremarkable moments. A tearoom becomes the setting for an act of torture, for instance, and a parlor scene becomes a surreal conflation of incongruities. The parlor scene, a painting called Hammerhead, depicts two women sitting on a sofa beneath historic Japanese art prints and an image of the Pietà. One woman is reading, while the other is grasping at a writhing hammerhead shark. You can wonder at the work’s possible meanings, but for Speed, meanings are subjective. They emerge from both the creation process and the mind of the beholder. “Because my work is mostly figurative, people assume that I start out with an idea or concept and then represent it,” she told Pasatiempo. “But I work the other way around. I start with the composition and, more than any other element, the composition drives the narrative.”
Speed’s first exhibition at Evoke Contemporary opens Friday, Jan. 6. It’s a traveling show organized by Austin’s Flatbed Press and Ruiz-Healy Art in San Antonio. Evoke is showing more than 50 works by Speed. An open-ended narrative sense makes her artwork enigmatic. Often, action is taking place, such as the small rescue boat on the sea in the painting
Kunisada’s Ghosts, en route to a sinking house in the distance. But the relationship of this little drama to the central figures on the shore — a mix of costumed Japanese in the style of ukiyo-e woodblock prints made popular by Utagawa Kunisada in the 19th century, along with Speed’s own stylized renderings of people — clownish, slightly grotesque, and childlike — is unclear. We want Speed’s work to tell us stories, but here we have the prompts for crafting narratives of our own. You can look at her painting Milky Way, for instance — wherein military and political figures argue over a pile of skulls, with a pack of snarling wolves and a tantrum-throwing child getting in on the act — as an allegory of war. But the scene’s inclusion of the Milky Way, glimpsed through the windows, suggests something else — while leaders argue, the universe goes on, and will remain long after men and their petty squabbles die away. “Milky Way didn’t start out to be about war and its atrocities,” Speed said. “The geometric elements
were in place early, so if it was going to be a completely abstract painting, the composition was settled. ... Then the news came of another horrific event in the Middle East. Sometimes the work changes in response to the news, sometimes to what I’m reading or thinking about, or sometimes for no reason that I can understand and point to, and while the painting may stop changing when it’s finished, my thoughts about it continue to change long after the work has left the studio. I love that other people think of things that would have never occurred to me.”
Speed works out of a studio in Marfa, Texas. Although she spent a brief period in the late 1960s studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, she’s mostly self-taught. She uses her mediums of gouache and collage to complement one another, blending paint and paper seamlessly so that her own draftsmanship and that of illustrators, whose images she culls for her compositions, are cohesive. Elements like the Japanese figures in her Christian-themed painting Good Friday might seem incongruous, but their inclusion reveals a deep-enough knowledge of art history, art movements, and their stylistic conventions to establish associations between them, conflating events and artistic styles separated by great periods of time. Her not-especially-flattering depictions of people recall the images of the unsophisticated masses in Dutch genre painting, like something by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569). But they also recall the bardo figures of Tibetan Buddhist art, trapped as they are in cycles of ignorance, anger, suffering, and pain.
One can see the influence of Dutch vanitas still lifes in her work, too, which often contain memento moris, symbolic references to mortality that express a Christian view of earthly pursuits, antithetical to spiritual discipline. Undertoad, for example, shows a skull, a common memento mori in Western art traditions, attached to a leafless tree (the title comes from the toad nestled in its roots). But Speed’s take is less didactic than that of her forebears. Although she takes inspiration from Renaissance art, Dutch painting, antique medical and scientific journals, and the “Floating World” woodblock prints of Japan, among other sources, it isn’t to emulate them. Rather, she can use them materially, to cast them into reimagined scenarios where these disparate artistic elements can continue speaking to us out of their original context. “The things that I’m drawn to, I’m
not drawn to because they’re older,” she said. “I detest nostalgia. It’s their individual specific characteristics that I’m interested in. I understand that people think about art in terms of time, place, and subject matter, but I’ve never actually experienced it that way myself. For me, it’s all one.”
A dark sense of humor pervades Speed’s artwork, which straddles an edge between comedy and a discomfiting sense of irrationality. Her figures, often rendered as angry or bemused, seem as though they’re caught in situations of their own making, creators of their own Hell, with no cognizance of the fact that they’re in it. But that doesn’t mean they can’t elicit a laugh or two. Pope Descending is a case in point. In the painting, men argue over a game of cards with a cooked chicken, a vulva-like split down its center, resting between them. The Pope, meanwhile, can be seen through an open doorway as he is falling down a flight of stairs. “That painting was almost finished, and I’d painted the little figure in the background that has tripped on the dog and is falling down the stairs as a self-portrait. Then I remembered what happened last time I painted myself into a painting. About 15 years ago, in a painting called Tea, I painted myself as the figure in the window of a distant building with my hair on fire. That night we were invited to a fancy dinner party at the home of some people that I didn’t really know very well. During dinner, I leaned over the table for something and the candle caught my hair and it instantly ignited with a giant whoosh of flame. It was over in a flash, but the smell remained and pretty much ruined the party.” The memory prompted her to remove herself from Pope Descending and replace her image with the pope. “Then I started laughing because the pope falling down the stairs reminded me of Marcel Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircase, and so I decided to title the painting Pope
Descending. The very next morning the first thing I saw on my computer was the announcement that Pope Benedict had just become the first pontiff since, I think, 1415 or so, to voluntarily ‘descend’ from the papal throne.”
Not all of the work in the exhibit is narrative. Speed works in abstraction, too, but representational elements still come into play. Death and the Maiden, In
Flagrante, and In Flagrante Again, for instance, contain molecular and amoeba-like figures derived from old texts. But even among protozoa, Death appears, shown here as a skull collaged onto the head of a spermatozoal form. “A lot of the collage elements that you notice in Death and the Maiden, In Flagrante, and In Flagrante Again are from Gray’s Anatomy,” she said. “Gray’s is particularly useful because it’s been in steady use as a textbook since the late 1800s, so there are a lot of wrecked copies out there floating around, and I find them regularly. Other collage elements are sourced from old biology textbooks, seashell engravings and silver pattern illustrations from a 19th-century art journal. I’ve been collecting wrecked books and pieces of books for almost my whole life.”
Speed stresses the importance of using books in disrepair for source material — she chooses to use found elements as they are, with little manipulation. “The rules to my game are that I’m not allowed to take apart any good books, use any internet-sourced material or my scanner and printer to blow anything up or down, so I buy what I can find at flea markets, eBay, and junk stores. Sometimes I find things while I’m out walking. The precipice in Precipice is a cementmix bag I found blowing down the street. Fire, flood, and children are my friends, because they ruin the most books. Lately I’ve been finding and using a lot of 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints, so I’ve added worms to my thank-you list. Because the woodblock prints were done on paper made from the bark of mulberry trees, the worms can’t resist it.”