Julia Garcia virtually opened the doors of her Minneapolis studio to us one night, where we discussed her recent bodies of work as they relate to one another, as well as desire and the dangers of nostalgia. We got to see a pastel drawing in progress which acted as a kind of background to her webcam image. The source image for the drawing is a tiny 35mm slide photograph taken by an audience member of a children’s performance. That tiny slide had come a long way since its conception: an image of a drawing of an image of a performance that occurred somewhere, at some point, probably a long time ago. For all that might be lacking in the virtual studio visit, the teletechnological feat of that particular image to reach us in New York should be noted, and, more importantly, so should the resonance that its journey has with Garcia’s practice. That is, the image on the screen, which was once a photograph discarded, forgotten about, lost or left behind, has been, by virtue of Julia’s project,  stripped of its context and made anew in time and space.

During our conversation, I was reminded of a line that Pierre Bonnard wrote in his journal in 1937, which is repeated a few times in Timothy Hyman’s 1998, Bonnard (Thames and Hudson): “let it be felt that a painter was there.” The line highlights Bonnard’s insistence on subjectivity and emotion as an articulation of painting’s possibilities. The types of images that Julia works with are chosen not just because of their compositional or formal value, but because they are representations and iterations of specific desired effects—some familial or personal, some low-brow and commercial, or desire itself. Julia’s work underlines their fallibility by giving them subjectivity, as if she says to them, “let it be felt that there is a painting there.”

What attracts you to drawing?

It’s a really foundational part of my practice. I think the first thing I did was draw, in terms of an introduction to mediums. Like someone hands you some crayons and paper as a child and you just go for it.  It’s something I come back to all the time.

What's the source material for this work?

This is from a bunch of 35 millimeter slides that I bought on eBay. I've got a light box that I can look at them through. It’s a photo of a performance taken from the audience–a children's play or something like that. I've been drawn recently towards images of the relationship between spectatorship and performance.

The aspect of performativity feels like a continuation of your previous kind of bodies of work. I see the Florida imagery as one body of work, and then these retro family and commercial imagery as its own exploration, but there's a through line of performativity on the surface level that runs through that. Especially the girls wrestling the gators, which is staged as well.

Yeah, I'm interested to see where it goes. I definitely feel those through lines as well, but I'm in a strange place in the studio where there’s a lot of not knowing—the mystery of why exactly these things—and the connections they have to the work before, which is always a fun place to be, but it’s also a little bit of a scary place to be. Especially after making a larger body of work there’s a lot of doubt about what comes next. I think the “idea” for a painting I distrust a lot, a thought in painting is its own thing that needs to happen in the act.

How did you begin working with found imagery?

.I don’t remember exactly when it started, when I was young, like an early teen, I would paint from National Geographics. My father is a painter as well, he did reproductions at one point-crops of the sistine chapel. I grew up with those hanging in my house. So maybe early on there was this sense that images could be lifted from anywhere when you were painting. Less sense of ownership or boundaries. I've gone through a lot of different moments of what I'm interested in painting.

Many times there is some secondary thing as a starting point, even if I don't adhere exactly to it, though I’m also thinking so much about form/color and figure/ground tension recently that working from no source has become really satisfying as well. In terms of the recent bodies of work that we were talking about, I think it’s been a lot of getting lost in different image based platforms. So there's this voyeur element to it as well, like being on a one sided glass, clicking through and finding all of these images, saving them, and then re-examining them, or making connections between them through the act of bringing them into the studio and using them as source material.

What image ends up being chosen feels like a split between conceptual things that I'm thinking about and what I’m interested in terms of compositional components, kinds of tension. I don't necessarily always feel like paintings are about something, but that there's a way in which the choices that you make to get to a painting can be very much about something.

There's this Baudrillard quote that I've been a little bit obsessed with lately–“the creative act replicates itself to become nothing more than a sign of its own operation. The true subject of a painter is no longer what he or she paints, but the very fact that he or she paints”– which I thought was perfect and amusing. I love how much he hates painting, but how much devotes himself to the act of describing painting because it feels devotional. It’s like what you’re saying about the act of painting is, in itself, one thing, in contrast with the thing that you're choosing to depict, and then there’s relationship between them.
 

Yeah that’s a key separation to me, between the act and what the act produces. I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between the image, the subject, and the material–those are the points that I end up oscillating between in my experience of painting. The image you’re shown isn't necessarily what the subject is, sometimes that exists outside the work. Very Tuymans. There's so many different ways to point to the subject, but the material oftentimes will assert itself as denying both the image and the subject, and end up having as much say as either of them, because it is still a physical object as well. That tension is interesting to me, keeping it open enough for those things to be at play together.

The way that you approach material pulls weight from those other two poles towards it, so that there is this balance, or an emphasis. It lends the material some power to pull at both subject and image into this triad.

I'm glad to hear that, because that's where my head is at.

You had a specific starting point with the alligator paintings. Does the formal language of those paintings apply to the other bodies of work with found imagery? What was the transition to other images like?

For me, the transition felt really fluid. That particular moment of the Florida imagery and that method of working, wet into wet on the ground, meshed together and made this space where I could sit with the whole process for longer. Staying with a certain kind of imagery for a long time is something that I always struggle with. I think because the reference itself is just an excuse to paint. 

I forced myself to slow down a lot these last couple years, this exercise of keeping a process going for longer, experimenting with it more. How far can I push the sense of control vs accepting that the material is going to do.

There was a technical development between the Florida works and the body of work that you showed at GAA Gallery [Slow Burn, 2024]. There’s also a difference in the subject matter, this imagery of commercialism and classic Americana, wood panel walls and what not. The language still feels like a continuation, but the way that you treated the images seems to have shifted with that body of work.

The through line for me was very much about fantasy and desire and images that are meant to propagate or instigate desire. When I went down the rabbit hole of alligator pin up photos, it was through essentially pornographic sites, with paywalled images of people hunting in bikinis and posing with whatever they were catching. The fact of the existence of that imagery kind of presupposes an audience for the imagery.

The kind of power dynamics that are at play in how we consume images and who images are made for felt very connected to that, it was very fluid to move into using stock imagery. I was drawn to the kind of images that you would find in advertisements, or when you walk into a gym and there's a big vinyl print on the wall. I was documenting some things myself, but also just collecting those kinds of images online. There was a similar kind of idealism of fantasy, and an aspirational quality, as in the alligator images. They're showing you what to want essentially—the ideal thing.

Then when I was going through all of these family photos, a lot of those scenes were very similar to the stock imagery. The quality is different, 35mm has a really particular blown out light. One is creating a feeling of nostalgia for something past, and the other is usually pointing toward a thing that you're being told to want; it leaves you in the middle very split to have them next to each other. But ultimately maybe questioning if either is more than a fantasy.

I think in regards to how those were made, I definitely got more comfortable with the method of working, how I layered color and how thick or diluted paint was. I’ve always been interested in what you can withhold while still achieving an image that's readable. It's almost like poetry, it's not about a ton of words, necessarily. It can be an economy of words, or an economy of marks to get to the point. To metaphorically point to something else, it is and it isn’t. Kind of endless. This idea of what can be implied, even without being described, and still feel really present.

There’s something fascinating about the found family photos in your work juxtaposed with the advertisements. The advertisements are of a very overt purpose–get something, buy something, or want something. The family photos are not that, but the photograph was taken of something for a reason. What makes you attracted to those two kinds of found imagery specifically?

That’s a really tricky question for some reason. They're both fascinating in the fact that stock images have an insidious element. It’s a lot about the context it’s used in, they’re so bland almost, meant to be as relatable as possible but also so unrealistically polished that they’re kind of alienating. But yeah, so often it’s serving or propping up some kind of buy in. Like a pharmaceutical ad vibe. Simultaneously, there’s something similar in how nostalgia works: we take a picture to remember a thing, and it cuts it out of time and removes it from the actual conditions of the situation. And then we have this image that becomes an idealization, a point of building a new narrative around. Conditions are able to be smoothed out, eroded almost, so that the quality of missing it, wanting it, is much easier. It becomes this story.

It's so precarious.

Very precarious. It’s two sides of the same thing in a way, because neither of them really exist. The imagery is looped, we're trying to catch these things.

The same image could remind you of many different things, but whatever it does hold is really subjective. There's a tension between what it actually was and what you want it to be.

Yeah, and images are so powerful in terms of how we remember, how we contextualize ourselves in history. There's the image, and then our explanation of it. When that veers towards being more idealistic, it’s almost eroding or letting go of the multifacetedness of actual experience. I feel like it can be kind of dangerous.

When you paint from an image it’s like you’re disembodying it to create the painting, which becomes almost like a repository for the viewer of the painting to look at and be reminded of their own experiences. What do you see as the relationship between those things? You're taking something that someone experienced and solidified into an image, recreating that image for then another person to project their experience on to or connect with.

It's definitely something that I think about. It's hard not to think about, because there's almost a perverted role that I play. With some of the source photos, I'm going through evidence of other people's lives, but I have no context for any of it. I don't know who they are. I don't like to paint people that I know personally. Maybe it's because there's something about this role that’s… ‘violence’ is too strong of a word…  but taking an image from somebody else's personal history, and then choosing to represent that, giving it new connotations that other people are going to experience it through. It's a strange role to have.

It’s like you're sitting in the middle of this mirror, there's these two images on either side. The original person who created the image, and then your viewer looking at the image that you've created, and you're almost mediating those two.

I do have some voice in that mediation in terms of the press release or work title, but there's also this way in which I don't have very much control over how people experience them but I’m pretty okay with that.

“not all paintings do this, but I think that ideally, it kind of occupies this third place of resisting time.”

Are the works additive to the source material in some way? Or do you find that they're a distillation or a compression?

I don't know that they're either additive or distilling, to me paintings really feel like they’re in their own trajectory separate from external referents. I was recently listening to Graham Harman, who talks about object oriented ontology. The famous thing that he describes is the third table. It's this idea of things existing, not necessarily just in a reductive way, a breakdown of components, or a relational way, defining something just through how we interact with it. But that there are withdrawn qualities in the table that are inaccessible.

The role of a painting, how it is able to resist time and resist interpretation so that you can have multiple interactions with it,  and so that its read can shift and be different for other individuals. This quality of not being able to transcribe it into another state, to summarize it, because parts will always be withheld. That this has something to do with being, with how we exist. I think that ideally, and not all paintings do this, but I think that ideally, it kind of occupies this third place of resisting time.

It's a continual question. It asks you to continuously participate and approach, rather than giving you something tied up nicely with a bow on it.

Yes, and there's an important part of almost turning away from the imageness, disregarding the image at a certain point, not having fealty to the image. Especially working from photography and found photography, there's a way in which painting can slip into simply transcribing or describing a photo. There's a pivot that it has to make in order to allow itself to foreground its own material, the physicality of making a painting, the pace of the marks that you're making. Sometimes things accumulate really slowly over time. I would say that I work at a faster pace than a lot of people, and that almost resonant energy from the act of making is doing something.

The Wonder, 2024
acrylic, ink, and dye on canvas, 80 x 90 inches

I was reading an interview with Luc Tuymans from 2015 which mentions that each painting from a recent show was done in a day. Given some similarities of your work, do you work at a similar pace?

Sometimes. I feel like it's different, this work [Stage Light, 2024] is already quite slow and contemplative compared to other works from when I started. I worked on it a couple of times already. I don’t always do that, but I don’t have such a strict code. It’s more about achieving a state of happening-ness, there should be this lasting effect, not just of going through the motions. I want the painting, and I experience this with lots of artists' work, to feel like maybe it was just finished moments ago before you saw it, maybe something in it is still finishing as you look. Working specifically with the taping process, that structure, and then water, a total lack of structure, the pace goes slow and then it really does go fast. 

You know before you start a few things, some composition and what things you want to feel bounded, what things you want to start to fuse. It does something to the depth of space, because it really affects the sense of simultaneity. Working wet into wet, you really only have the period of time in which it's evaporating, and without gesso the surface is really a record of all the marks. That water line if you go into something that has dried, where the pigment concentrated on the edge. So those paintings have a lot of developing and honing in on building out the structure first, whether it was in small iterations, drawings, whatever. It's a lot of preparation and building and structure, and then just going for it. It alway ends up being a little bit more hectic and chaotic. You can plan all you want, but it's not actually going to do the things that you thought it was going to do. A lot of the work that was for the show at Gaa and the show at KDR were things that I made in one go, however long it took.

I saw the group show at Hair and Nails [Freshly For You, 2024] and then when I was looking at some of your older work I noticed that there was something that I had missed before. That work of someone in armor [The Red Shield, 2024], seems to be singular in terms of its source imagery.

That painting is actually from the slides, someone's found photos; I think it was a child's Halloween costume.

I feel like images of childhood are very vulnerable because there’s this massive potential for trauma during childhood. Particularly in family dynamics, and in the depiction of these everyday things, it feels psychologically loaded. Some of the old photos that I'll find will be of a baby learning to crawl, and there's one shoe in the frame of someone who's standing, watching. That relationship immediately makes the image feel very heavy, in terms of the vulnerability of this small moment along with an entity that feels much more powerful. A baby kissing a doll, it’s very innocent, but that record, the presence of the photographic eye, it starts to feel uncomfortable.

Something evocative, but not explicit.

Yeah, it's interesting to think about why that is. What is it about an image? Why this image and not that image is a really tricky question that I ask myself a lot, but I don't have a definitive answer to.

I can see what you’re talking about with the image behind you [Stage Light, 2024]. It's a bunch of kids putting something on for adults, but they may not even want to be on that stage. It's an incredibly vulnerable place to be. There's layers that feel present in all of the images that you select, multiple entry points to that image, or multiple layers where it's heavily psychologically loaded.

That’s something I'm always trying to do, to come at them from a lot of different ways.

It’s interesting, because I haven't seen any of the source imagery, but it almost feels like you are bringing a photograph back to fallibility, or looking at it in this way which destabilizes their ‘truth’. If a photograph is allegedly objective, pure information, then you fuck with it in the way that memory also does.

Even more so in the kind of condition that we're living in today, where images are taken as objective less and less. It's very easy, with AI, images have definitely lost this sense of  document, but I think historically they've had a lot more of that power. They're much more easily cast into doubt now, but it’s still a very satisfying way of relating to the world. Mediating it, bounding the experiences that are essentially edgeless. I like to think about it.

It’s interesting to think about the way in which photography and images have lost all superiority or standing as a bearer of fact. We bring this inherent distrust as we move through this different way of digesting imagery.

Yeah, lot of what we’ve been speaking about has been photography, the photographic image in particular and how it relates to painting, but image making is much longer than the conversation photography is having, the influence it has. There's so much going on from before photography, which is a more recent influence in terms of the history of painting. Painting is so, so massive.