Post-Frontier Landscapes
Solo Exhibition, R2 Gallery
Opening Reception
6 - 8 p.m. Friday August 9th, 2019
Carbondale Arts Center at The Launchpad
76 S. 4th St., Carbondale, Colorado
https://www.carbondalearts.com/r2-gallery/
“Based outside Grand Junction, Julia March Crocetto’s solo exhibition “Post-Frontier Landscapes” presents a topographical body of work rooted in research and process that investigates waterways of the west. Incorporating creative mapping, found materials, surface design, and textiles, the resulting pieces appear as mysterious, painterly abstractions.”
Post-Frontier Landscapes is a facet of my study of borderzones and anomalies, which developed from my attempts to connect with place and grapple with my faulty memories of the West. This attention to anomaly was amplified when I moved to the desert from the lush Pacific Northwest three years ago. “Post-Frontier” is my description of the present condition of the American West; on the surface it feels familiar and evokes nostalgia, upon closer inspection it reveals the colonial, drought-afflicted story of the Anthropocene. It is my response to anomalies such as administrative lines on a map, often arbitrary to the topographic, biological, or cultural content of the land they transect. It is my lament for loss of wilderness and innocence, that there is no place in the American West “untrammeled by man”.
Employing creative mapping, I layer found materials, impressions recorded on location, scientific data, and actions such as tracing, wrapping, stitching, and unstitching. Mental states of solastalgia (pain related to loss of home/place), topophilia (love of place and landscape), and biophilia (love of nature) are parts of the equation.