Julia Lambright Artist Statement

For my final project, I entertained many ideas on the direction I wanted to take with the theme of my series, but after some personal reflection, I finally landed on one that strayed quite drastically from the others. Recently I have begun to come to the realization that my college career is coming to an end. I feel unprepared to leave this school that I love, and scared for what the future will bring. But most of all, I feel torn on one overarching question: now where do I belong? Moving to California for college was the biggest decision I have made in my life, and while I feel as though Seattle will always be my true home, a part of me now belongs here, with the experiences that I have had and the friends that I have made. I wanted to create a project that accurately represented the internal struggle I now feel as I face the choice of whether or not I stay here after graduation, or go home to Seattle.

My project is composed of three mixed media drawings. The first depicts a pair of hands holding a sharp succulent plant. The second depicts a woman holding a bouquet of ferns, and the third depicts a self portrait, but while the lower half of the face is visible, the upper half of my face is obscured by a forest of evergreen trees.

As stated above, the theme in this series regards my lack of a permanent home. I have been living here in California for the past four years, and suddenly my time here is coming to an end, and there is a good chance that I will be heading back home to Seattle in just a few short months. Yes, I love Seattle and it will always be home to me, but there is now a definite part of me that belongs here in California. The hands holding the succulent represent this new belonging to me. The succulent represents California, as it thrives in the sunny hot climate here but suffers in the rain and gloom of Seattle. Although it is a smaller part of me that feels this attachment to California, it nonetheless confuses me as I transition into this next part of life.

As for the self portrait, the meaning is displayed quite literally: Seattle is a part of me- it will always be my home and will always hold a place in my heart. My memories will always cause a longing for the trees, and always will always remain on my mind. Lastly, the woman in the middle holds a bouquet, something that symbolizes beauty and elegance. However, instead of the expected array of bright flowers, it instead is composed of simple green ferns. This represents seeing the beauty in what is around you, and being open to accepting that perhaps not all people share the same idea of what defines beauty. Sure, it is easy to believe that a bouquet of roses is beautiful, but because of my memories and experiences, I see that same level of beauty in something as seemingly plain and unnoticeable as ferns.

Final - Artist Statement

Everyone fakes a smile sometimes. I know when I do, it's because I don't have the energy capacity to explain how I am feeling or have the time to evaluate what I am feeling.

My final series, How Are You Today?, explores a range of emotions that I have felt over this past semester under my smiles. The three pieces represents feelings of uselessness, empowerment, and acceptance. With the use of broad stokes and vibrant colors, How Are You Today?, manifests a visual for these feelings to evolve and grow. 

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My inspiration came from my inability to express and create works that reflects my inner emotions. This semester has been incredibly challenging for me and has pushed me to limits that I am still unsure are limits I want to reach again. I went through a range of emotions this year and felt them deeper than I have ever before. 

Feelings of uselessness stemmed from a collection of experiences where I felt doubted and unworthy of the path that I have chosen for myself. From critiques from professors to the 2016 Election results, my path of film-making and activism was challenged to a point where I could not longer see a purpose nor a will to continue on. 

Feelings of empowerment were strongest when I was reminded of community and the wondrous power of Love. Paraphrasing the late Grace Lee Boggs, we have "a limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other.” I am fortunate enough to have people around me that constantly inspire me with their work and love. These moments helped me realize that I must continue on this path that I have chosen and I can do the work that I want because I have people that are willing to support me. 

And lastly, feelings of acceptance was an important part of this semester. Though I felt useless sometimes, though I felt empowered other times, in the end it was acceptance that helped me get through this semester. It is acceptance that helps me everyday. For this piece's background, I painted in the word "我", meaning "I" in Chinese. The origins of this word come from the word for hand and weapon showing that human can protect itself. And that is what acceptance has done for me, I am learning to protect myself, to believe in myself, and to share my limitless love.

I usually am one to be very detail oriented in artwork and a fan of small strokes. But for this piece I wanted to explore the feeling of fast, broad, and expressive movements of paint and oil pastels. 

For my visual references I pulled inspiration from the following artists:

(Artist: Omar Galliani)

(Artist: Jaeyeol Han)

(Artist: Katty Huertas)

(Artist: Yoshida Masaji)

(Artist: Hsiao Chin)

Artist Bio

       Art has always been my means of communication to express what I desire to say most. For me, interacting with others and feeling connected socially is sometimes difficult but art is my outlet to convey my experiences and to depart from reality.

       I have always been drawn to the human body human face, but I think there is something more to that attraction than I had realized when I first started drawing. I now have a better understanding that I am attracted to the human condition, human’s interaction with space and the remnants of the human body. It is not necessarily the form of the flesh itself or the person inside it that I am fascinated by, it is how the human body interacts with the world around it. Bodily fluids, stains, and skin have all been motifs in my work over the past two years. A lot of this has to do with my personal narrative of having chronic cystic acne for most of my life and the fact that I am a woman and experiencing life in a woman’s body. I feel as though I am exceptionally conscious of my physical appearance because of my skin condition and also because I am a female and my body can regularly be sexualized. These factors have influenced my interests not only as a person but as an artist.

       I have always loved the work of Jenny Saville, who was the one who initially inspired me to become an artist. When I entered college, Eva Hesse and Robert Rauschenberg’s sculptures allowed me to develop an entirely different understanding of medium and how they can be utilized. My work has developed materialistically because of these two artists as I continue to experiment. I tend to work more with feminine and domestic materials such as fabric, yarn and string.

       For my final project, I wanted to start in a way I had never done before, solely from materials. I let the materials that I collected from my childhood home speak to me and dictate the direction in which my work went. I collected parchment paper, wallpaper, embroidery thread, needles, fabric, wood, underwear and brown paper bags. All of these materials adhered to a certain color scheme and had an undertone of domesticity. I then painted myself nude on the wood, sewed several portraits of women and wallpapered the wood to distort my image. I framed the portraits and included them over the wallpaper and parchment paper. I also took two pieces of parchment paper and made them into scrolls, on which I sewed fragments of the female body, a hand and a knee. After the creation of this piece, the extremely domestic materials created their own dialogue which I believe lends to many interpretations. Because the figure is covered with wallpaper and parchment, it leads the viewer to think of the figure as more in the background and less significant. The underwear has a sense of both nostalgia and sexual innocence while the sewn portraits of women almost seem historic in the style in which they were created. I have intentionally relinquished my control and tendency to overanalyze and project onto my work in hopes it will speak for itself.

Artist Bio

Art has always been my thing. Some girls were good at soccer. Some were good at math. I was considered good at art. While art has always been a large part of my life, I feel I am just beginning to understand it and see its true potential. After this final, I will have completed my degree from Chapman as well as my art minor. While I have enjoyed my art classes here, I am also very excited to make art outside of a classroom setting. Wherever my path may take me, I know that art will always be a part of my life and something that brings me more joy than any other activity. 

Many things influence me, but there are few key influences that I always find my way back to. I like to work primarily with the human figure, particularly with portraiture. Typically, most of the figures I draw are females seeing as this is something I heavily identify with. I also take a lot of inspiration from fashion imagery. Growing up, my mother worked in fashion and we always had plenty of issues of Vogue spread throughout the house. I would rip out pages of the magazines and tape them on my wall, treating them like little pieces of art. As I’ve grown older, I still draw a lot of inspiration from fashion and have gained even more respect for fashion photography. Another one of my big influences is spirituality and religion. I attended Catholic school for 8 years of my life and while I don’t consider myself a religious person, I am definitely a spiritual one. I love the sacred feeling present in depictions of saints or other religious figures. I am always eager to learn about new religions, gods, and practices. Recently, I have been very interested in Hinduism, Greek mythology and more spiritual practices, such as the healing powers of crystals.

For my final series, I wanted to go back to my artistic roots, with a slight twist. Like many other artists, I started with pencil. Even as a kid and a teenager, I loved doing pencil portraits of people I saw in magazines, but when I got to college I felt that this wasn’t good enough. Many classes discouraged pencil as a medium for a final piece. My use of figures from fashion photography was even more looked down upon. While other people painted abstract things, I enjoyed painting portraits, but was typically looked down upon. Seeing as this is my last art final at Chapman ever, I wanted to create something that I was proud of, regardless of whether other people considered it fine art enough. While I am most comfortable with pencil drawings, I have recently gotten into other elements like wood and collage. I wanted to showcase my growth throughout my art career at college by also integrating these elements. I was influenced by artists such as Elle Wills and Christine Kim for this series.

Beauty Meets Technology

For this project, I was inspired to create futuristic figures that showcase advancements in technology and beauty standards.  I wanted to create figures that were a hybrid of natural human bodies and technological modifications. I imagine these figures existing in our world in the not to distant future. As a society, we already have a tendency to modify our bodies, whether it is more beauty or health reasons. I think that in the future these tendencies will become more standard than they already are. In the future, I can see individuals putting actual pieces of technology onto and into their bodies. The three figures I presented in my piece are a glimpse into what I believe could become a reality one day. I wanted to make these figures unsettling to the viewer in a variety of ways. By making them bodiless, I wanted emphasize the modifications done to their face and hair. By making them eyeless, I wanted to showcase that while they might be humans to the core, they also are machinelike.

My main influence for this piece was Agnieszka Osipa. Although she is not an artist in the traditional sense, to me she is. Agnieszka is a Polish costume designer I recently stumbled upon. When I first saw photos of her work, it stopped me in my tracks because of how different it was. Her work mainly consists of elaborate headdresses and gowns. She infuses Eastern European traditions with elements of fantasy. Her works are undoubtedly beautiful, but also evoke a sort of eeire darkness.  I hoped to capture this unsettling feeling that comes from her works, as well as the rich detail that goes into each of them. She uses luxurious materials like lace, pearls, fine metals, and jewels. I tried to mimic the same sense of detail, but with materials that seemed more futuristic and cyborg like. I also wanted to show the same precision that she shows in her work. While her works take months to complete and I didn’t have that kind of time, I still wanted to use small materials and make my designs precise.

Another one of my influences was the beauty standards of the Capitol in the Hunger Games. In the movies and the books, the Capitol represents the most of elite of the population. Many of the residents have has extreme beauty procedures and body modifications done that fit the drastic beauty standards of the time. Seeing as the Hunger Games acts as sort of a social commentary on what could happen in the future, it seems realistic that beauty procedures like the ones shown could exist one day.  

http://www.bellexotique-magazine.com/2015/01/07/agnieszka-osipa-exclusive-slavic-goddess/

https://www.instagram.com/agnieszkaosipa/?hl=en

https://beautifulbizarre.net/2015/12/17/historical-couture-works-of-agnieszka-osipa/

http://capitolcouture.pn

http://www.instyle.com/celebrity/hunger-games-fashion-effies-most-outrageous-looks#340579

http://www.fashiongonerogue.com/covergirl-hunger-games-makeup-collection/

Star Spangled

       With the election and all of the political upheaval going on, I had a hard time deviating away from a very political piece, for my mind could not stop thinking about the unrest that is going on in America. When I started to think of a machine, I thought of the capitalist machine and how wealth can turn people cold and mechanical, thinking only of profit. With the results of this election in, it has become clear that capitalism will be stronger now more than ever and that the political machine will carry on.

       The idea of the human turned machine really fascinated me, because I do believe that over time, people can lose the sentimental nature that they once had and lose faith in other humans, turning them cold. Often, once people have something that they deem willing to protect, they forget about the compassion they once had for others that are struggling. They solidify their beliefs and forget that they once believed so deeply in something else. As much as I can appreciate the benefits of capitalism, I do believe that it is a system that favors a certain group of people and dehumanizes the lower classes and deems them unworthy of resources. The amount of greed that can come out of capitalism or even politics in general is so unfortunate, which is why I selected the very symbolic images that I did for my collage.

       I started out with the face of the Statue of Liberty, which is a huge symbol for America and freedom. I cut out her eyes and under them I placed a sign for a Trump Tower in New York, in attempt to show how the eyes of liberty have been jaded and covered by Donald Trump’s ideals. Instead of points on her headpiece, I placed three Trump towers and the final Trump tower is cut up along the right side of her body. I drew her body in menswear to capitalize on the idea that it is “a man’s world” and everything about women, even our bodies, is about men.  In the background, I cut up five different images of gold bricks and shattered them in the background. I wanted to reference greed but also a shattered and spilt nation. Although not very noticeable, I printed out pictures of walls that exist on borders of countries and included three of them in the background, leading to the head of the statue of liberty. The final element I wanted to include was this transparent black paper along with stars. This was meant to represent the confusion and overlapping lies and judgment form the government, along with a cloud of confusion and doubt for this country. The stars represent the patriotism of the victors in the election, but can have a more spiritual or universal metaphor for the losers. This universe is so big and there are powers larger than us and maybe this horrible thing happened for a reason and there will be a change in America that cannot yet be seen. I put all of this on a silver sheet of wrapping paper, to outline how everything in America seems shiny and new and ideal, but in truth we actually have a lot of problems. This election was very emotional for me and this piece embodies my emotions toward the outcome and the despair for this country that I have begun to face.