The Power Plant

The Power Plant presents a major solo exhibition by New York–based artist Julia Dault. Contextualizing new projects through a selection of past works, the exhibition Color Me Badd reveals the importance to Dault of balancing spontaneous gesture with responsiveness to rules, logic and the constraints of materials. Physical negotiations are central to Dault’s textured paintings and improvised sculptures; both are exhibited in Color Me Badd.

Dault’s rule-based painting process involves responding to mass-produced elements—vinyl, patterned silks, pleather, unmixed paint straight from the tube—with unconventional tools, such as squeegees and rubber combs. These tools create quasi-standardized gestures that allow Dault to skirt the line between expressive abstraction and cool, machine-like facture. Erasure, with its ability to allow viewers to “see into” the painting process, is as important as application.

The idea of the artwork as an index of the artist’s labor recurs in Dault’s sculptures. Always improvising on site and working alone, the artist manipulates and coerces Plexiglas, Formica, and other industrially produced materials into imposing curved forms, and then affixes them to the gallery wall using straps and cords. Dault’s efforts can be understood as “private performances” in which her physical capabilities are juxtaposed with the properties of the materials she employs. Each sculpture is titled with a time stamp that reflects the duration it took to complete the piece. In this gesture, as with her paintings, she hopes to underline the temporal nature of the art-making process.

Dault’s work fuses the emphasis on process found in both Abstract Expressionist painting and post-Minimal sculpture. She is interested in “embodied knowledge”—how making is thinking—by reinserting the artist’s hand into a minimal aesthetic primarily interpreted as distanced and industrial.

Fall 2014 Program Guide