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Julia Betts is a nationally recognized artist. Her work has been shown at venues such as Unsmoke Systems (Pittsburgh, PA), DDDD Pictures (New York, NY), Flux Factory (New York, NY), and Space Gallery (Pittsburgh, PA). Betts has been awarded residencies such as Yaddo, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was highlighted in “Women of the Rustbelt,” part of the 50 Women Project, which highlighted American women artists working outside New York City. Her work has also appeared in publications such as BOMB Magazine, Two Coats of Paint, and Femme Art Review. Betts received a BA in Studio Arts from the University of Pittsburgh (2014) and an MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (2017). Currently, she is an Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
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Statement: My work veers toward the intersection of sculpture, performance, and installation; and is defined by a series of radically disparate multimedia projects unified by their intentional unpredictability, use of unstable materials, and orchestration of situations in which my body and/or a constructed space are subjected to various hazards and forces of disorder. With each piece, my intent—although never completely pre-determined—is to push a range of materials to the limits of their utility, while placing myself in precarious circumstances that simultaneously function as metaphors of emotional/psychic vulnerability and pure demonstrations of intentional disarray. Generally, I make a mess—but it’s a purposeful, highly textured mess.
The germ of each piece is found through imposed limitations—in space, time, on my own perception/mobility, etc.—which leads to improvisation. I begin by putting myself in a bind; then force myself to find the beginnings of a project within a night or a couple hours, scrambling to figure out key parameters of which I did not/could not conceive in the planning stages. The initial restrictions and disorientation—especially the feelings of being rushed, confined, and otherwise pressured—reinvigorates me, spurring the discovery of new processes, and contributing to the final evolution and shape of the project. I attempt to pair this process with one or more of my ongoing obsessions/areas of interest, such as: how the mind and body respond to their surroundings when they’re overwhelmed or immersed in extreme conditions; and how certain materials behave when applied to tasks for which they’re wholly unsuited.
My piece “Window Screens” illustrates this combination of material and psychological concerns and how they collide in the heat of performance. In the piece, I built a steel box around myself in the corner of a room, then hung the box with window screens (on wire cords) and filled it with black ink. In the performance, I continuously dipped screens in ink as fast as I could. Each screen would hold the ink and become opaque, but then quickly return to transparency. In this cyclical labor of great difficulty and short-lived success, determination meets the impossible, with every aspect of the endeavor—from the materials to the person attempting to manipulate them—clearly not up to the task. Eventually the box began hemorrhaging ink and it spread across the floor to the viewers, emptying the apparatus and foiling my efforts completely.
Some degree of personal vulnerability and/or seeming ruination is present in all my performances, which in turn evoke certain responses from the audience, ranging from befuddlement and fascination to genuine sympathy or solicitousness. (Audience members have occasionally offered to help me during what they perceived as a moment of distress in the midst of my performance.)
In contrast to practical labor—and even most art—my work involves extensive preparation, toward no precise goal or predictable outcome, but rather the opposite: to create a uniquely precarious situation whose exact results are ambiguous and actually lead to disruption and upheaval. The specific thematic ideas that I wish to communicate with my work are important to me and essential to my art, but the work has other dimensions, which naturally emerge from the process of engineering a situation whose “moment of truth” is variable. This makes each piece—and my work as a whole—a vehicle for possibilities, achieved through transient/unknowable states. Above all, I am trying to create an effect based on certain assumptions, within a definite structure and clear parameters; but within these guidelines, randomness, even personal risk (certainly public embarrassment), are not just potentialities, but expectations.
The germ of each piece is found through imposed limitations—in space, time, on my own perception/mobility, etc.—which leads to improvisation. I begin by putting myself in a bind; then force myself to find the beginnings of a project within a night or a couple hours, scrambling to figure out key parameters of which I did not/could not conceive in the planning stages. The initial restrictions and disorientation—especially the feelings of being rushed, confined, and otherwise pressured—reinvigorates me, spurring the discovery of new processes, and contributing to the final evolution and shape of the project. I attempt to pair this process with one or more of my ongoing obsessions/areas of interest, such as: how the mind and body respond to their surroundings when they’re overwhelmed or immersed in extreme conditions; and how certain materials behave when applied to tasks for which they’re wholly unsuited.
My piece “Window Screens” illustrates this combination of material and psychological concerns and how they collide in the heat of performance. In the piece, I built a steel box around myself in the corner of a room, then hung the box with window screens (on wire cords) and filled it with black ink. In the performance, I continuously dipped screens in ink as fast as I could. Each screen would hold the ink and become opaque, but then quickly return to transparency. In this cyclical labor of great difficulty and short-lived success, determination meets the impossible, with every aspect of the endeavor—from the materials to the person attempting to manipulate them—clearly not up to the task. Eventually the box began hemorrhaging ink and it spread across the floor to the viewers, emptying the apparatus and foiling my efforts completely.
Some degree of personal vulnerability and/or seeming ruination is present in all my performances, which in turn evoke certain responses from the audience, ranging from befuddlement and fascination to genuine sympathy or solicitousness. (Audience members have occasionally offered to help me during what they perceived as a moment of distress in the midst of my performance.)
In contrast to practical labor—and even most art—my work involves extensive preparation, toward no precise goal or predictable outcome, but rather the opposite: to create a uniquely precarious situation whose exact results are ambiguous and actually lead to disruption and upheaval. The specific thematic ideas that I wish to communicate with my work are important to me and essential to my art, but the work has other dimensions, which naturally emerge from the process of engineering a situation whose “moment of truth” is variable. This makes each piece—and my work as a whole—a vehicle for possibilities, achieved through transient/unknowable states. Above all, I am trying to create an effect based on certain assumptions, within a definite structure and clear parameters; but within these guidelines, randomness, even personal risk (certainly public embarrassment), are not just potentialities, but expectations.