Julia Reising is an interdisciplinary artist that works with salvaged and reimagined architectural features to approach an understanding of the relationships of the home. Oftentimes, her process involves deconstructing items–chairs, staircase banisters, and home building materials like asphalt roofing shingles–to be recombined in non-traditional or non-functional ways. By merging the traditional discipline of painting with the less governed territory of contemporary sculpture, she works to create a false sense of domesticity within the gallery. While values can be malleable, they are both reflective of and responsive to our environmental frameworks. Julia’s work aims to unveil these fossils of living through the process of becoming privy to her own conditioning.
A junior at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities, Julia will be graduating from the Bachelor of Fine Arts program in 2022. Most recently, she assisted the artist collective Postcommodity with a commission for the Minneapolis Institute of Art in its show When Home Won’t Let You Stay, as well as exhibited her work in the Quarter Gallery and Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum. The artist’s work is also featured in the 2020 edition of The Tower Magazine and can be seen at the Larson Gallery and Quarter Gallery in upcoming shows in Minneapolis.
Her family of seven grew up in Wausau, Wisconsin, where she first became interested in the way the interior structure of her home facilitated family dynamics behind its brick facade and traditional style. On an ideal day, Julia enjoys reading a good piece of literature, walking her dog up Rib Mountain, and discussing movies.
Junk Drawer
While my practice is based on the physical fossils of living, my ideas of both tangibility and objecthood have evolved alongside my study of technological inventions. On my laptop is a folder entitled “miscellaneous internet objects,” begging the question of what truly is a photograph–and perhaps the greater question in this digital age: what constitutes an object anymore? In this project, I grapple with portraiture and the elusive idea that an image without a ‘sitter’ certainly does not have to be an image without life.
To view more of Julia’s work please visit their website.