Julia Campisi I WANT TO EAT YOUR SKY

February 12 – April 2, 2021

Lonsdale Gallery is pleased to present I WANT TO EAT YOUR SKY, a solo exhibition by Julia Campisi.

In a new body of work, Julia Campisi expands her ongoing fascination with feminine imagery by threading together symbols and objects with bubblegum pink sunsets and subtle hand gestures. She examines the temporal similarities between femininity and the moments of the sunset, as she started to recognize herself in this pattern. With this series, Campisi seeks to locate a discourse surrounding time and the feminine, which is more closely connected to identity and the body.

Julia Campisi I WANT TO EAT YOUR SKY
Incubator Project Space, Lonsdale Gallery

Here Now, Another Time Then?
2020
acrylic on canvas
36 x 48 inches

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I WANT TO EAT YOUR SKY, metabolizes the symbols and images associated with traditional femininity transforming them into collages, paintings and sculpture. Absorbing the original contexts of these images, Campisi gives them a new life. Using techniques of appropriation and repetition, she bridges the past with the present. She approaches these complex ideas through investigating how both phenomena are bound by the redundancy of time, filled with ideation and fixed in cliche imagery.

This symbiotic relationship is examined through objects, images and memories; observing how, as they both come into existence, they immediately begin to decay. The artist’s use of appropriated imagery recodes the female form, questioning the prosaic cultural by-products that these images themselves have memorialized throughout history. Using the sunset as the catalyst for introspection and unearthing its similar qualities to femininity, she is able to explore how they are dually coded – the language, power and meaning attached to both of them.

Julia Campisi I WANT TO EAT YOUR SKY
Incubator Project Space, Lonsdale Gallery

Knitted Blanket, Go Ahead
2020
collage and sculpture made from hydrocal
12 x 42 x 10 inches

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Knitted Blanket, Go Ahead (detail)
2020
collage and sculpture made from hydrocal
12 x 42 x 10 inches

Her sculpture, Knitted Blanket, Go Ahead, Campisi continues her exploration of memory and experiences. A single hand floats on the wall. Hanging from two fingers is a large blanket created from a hand-cut a collage. The hand performs a sensual gesture, holding it almost as an offering. Here, the artist memorializes the blanket as an object that represents woman’s work. By transforming the material properties of the photograph into a textile that resembles fine lace, Campisi seeks to alter our relationship with these seemingly mundane objects, negotiating between the past and the present.

The hand allows the artist to connect herself to larger life histories of those who came before us, activating time through the presence of the body. Campisi highlights how we hold onto ideas in the form of objects. Likewise, encouraging audiences to consider how the beliefs associated with these types of objects have not changed; but rather, it is time that allows our perception of them to endure.

Her paintings feed into the idea of sublime, expressing a sense of longing while also begging for solace. Using a soak-stain technique, Campisi floods the surface of the untreated canvases with warm luminous bands of color that mimic the glow of the sky.

Reminiscent of a Time Before This Time
2020
acrylic on canvas with sculpture made from hydrocal
24 x 36 inches (sculpture 2.5 x 7 inches)

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Touch Touch Sky Sky
2020
acrylic on canvas with sculpture made from hydrocal
30 x 40 inches (sculpture 5.5 x 7 inches)

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The process reveals an intimacy within the boundary of the canvas. The raw cotton of the canvases allows the colors to seep and blend into one another, producing a sublime ephemeral effect. Floating over the paintings are parts of cast hands, molded from the artist’s own body. For the artist: “their shapes bear traces of visual motifs found in our cultural debris of the female body.”

Almost weightless, the stark white the hand evokes cloud white and classical marble white. Here, the white has no colour yet possesses within it all the colours at once. Their bent fingers – so subtlety erotic – activate the paintings; creating tension between moment and memory, never meeting only running parallel.

Julia Campisi

Julia Campisi I WANT TO EAT YOUR SKY
Incubator Project Space, Lonsdale Gallery

Julia Campisi I WANT TO EAT YOUR SKY
Incubator Project Space, Lonsdale Gallery

Julia Campisi, Sunset Cloud Studies (2020)
I WANT TO EAT YOUR SKY
Incubator Project Space, Lonsdale Gallery

Her intimate collages further amplify the artist’s material explorations. They carry the symbolic weight of the original source images. Combined with how the work is cut and shaped, only remnants of remain visible, leaving only mere traces of their previous life. Presented together, they overflow and converge becoming events, rather than objects. Each iteration trying to capture a single fleeting moment over-and-over again. Both the source images and the final collages belong to the same realm. They acknowledge the ways the female body and nature are intimately interwoven.

Sunset Cloud Studies No. 2
2020
collage on paper
12 x 9.25 inches (unframed)

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Sunset Cloud Studies No. 5
2020
collage on paper
12 x 9.25 inches (unframed)

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Sunset Cloud Studies No. 7
2020
collage on paper
12 x 9.25 inches (unframed)

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The artist offers a compelling response to how femininity is coded and performed in Western culture. Campisi adopts the sublime as a strategy of appropriation and resistance. Deconstructing existing images from the past, she actively interrogates the social and ideological attitudes neatly packaged and imposed of women. Like the sunset, warm, habitual, filled with ideation, there is the chance that it stays where it is – held in a moment unable to free itself.