By Julian Watts
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Hand carved painting by Oregon based artist Julian Watts made of maple stained with black India ink and framed in maple wood. Currently on view at Patrick Parrish Gallery in Julian Watt's second solo exhibition with the gallery, "Homelife".
In Homelife Watts explores the idea of the home and how it functions as a poetic, living landscape that we not only live in, but are a part of. Working while locked down in his remote rural Oregon studio during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, Watts delved deep into his home environment, attempting to understand it on an intimate level as well as recognizing its place within a larger natural context. Watts engaged in an examination of functional everyday home objects such as furniture, bowls, and vessels, and quickly expanded outwards to a more cosmological view of home, exploring the geology, trees, rivers, and night sky that make up his rural setting. By exploring the perspectives of what constitutes a home in this way, the exhibition presents the objects we engage with and the spaces we live in with the complexity of a biological ecosystem and, in doing so, blurs the line between the home and its inhabitants.
The process and materials used reflect this idea on a fundamental level: the work is made primarily from locally salvaged hardwoods from Western Oregon near Watts’s studio...
Category
2010s American Julian Watts Furniture