Meet Julia Hechtman

Today we’d like to introduce you to Julia Hechtman.

Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I began as a religious studies major in college. I became an art major in my junior year. After I graduated I became a National Park Service Ranger. I began studies to become a nurse. I went to University of Illinois at Chicago for my MFA 7 years after finishing my BFA.

I have been teaching at the University level since 2001. I have taught all manner of courses from entry level to grad students.

In 2009, I went to Iceland on an artist residency at Nes in Skagastrond, Iceland. Since then, I have gone to Iceland close to a dozen times, always for a month or more. I lead a study abroad there every summer for Northeastern students. This January I will be on a Fulbright Scholar grant to teach and create work in Reykjavik at The Icelandic Academy of Art.

My work focuses on the natural world, but from an outsider’s perspective. I grew up in NYC and I believe I still have a child-like wonder regarding nature as a result of being exposed to so little of it.

Please tell us about your art.
I make works that subtly alter the familiar and ordinary to create a state of renewed curiosity and active engagement with images, objects, and events. I am drawn to collections, sentimentality and to recall. With regard to production I investigate how still and moving images can deliver meaning, and structure compositions, objects, and installations in a way that reproduces the quality of the first-hand encounter. I work to better understand, and to convey to the viewer, the contradictions and tensions that exist in active experience; between absence and presence, the urban and the natural, and the authentic and the invented, to name a few.

The ultimate goal remains, to deliver the viewer into a fully formed state of awareness that forwards concept and motivates productive conversation. I explore and question the value of “essentializing” meanings as they relate to time, movement, thought, action, emotion and ultimately, communication. Far from a reduction or simplification of effect I am interested in exploring how these essential practices can reveal deeper, more visceral investigations into life, environment and history (both personal and cultural). Balance, as a way of working, conceptually and materially, is at the heart of all that I do. To this end, for the last several years I have been seeking out details that are often taken for granted through the use of photography, sculpture, animation and video. As opposed to imaging the spectacular, I seek the sublime in the small-scale and the overlooked.

Do you have any advice for other artists? Any lessons you wished you learned earlier?
I still think about serving the world more directly. My main advice is to do what you love. If that includes things outside of the art world, all the better!

How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
My website is a great place to start: www.juliahechtman.com recently redesigned by an awesome Northeastern student, Nick Bond, who served as my TA this past summer in Iceland.

Locally…I will be showing my work in Vermont twice this fall, at UVM in an exhibition called Feverish World TENTworks and again at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in an exhibition called Ecstatic Beasts. I will have a solo show in Chicago sometime in the coming year at devening projects, though the exact dates and title have yet to be determined.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.juliahechtman.com

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