JULIE ANN NAGLE
Afterglow 2023
mixed media installation including paintings, kaleidoscope, beaded webs
Nagle’s project for Tinworks Art, Afterglow, combined sculpture and painting to create an interactive environment that rewarded close looking. While visiting Colorado in 2020, Nagle learned about the abundance of naturally-occurring radon seeping out of the ground in large parts of the state. She had also been working with a new strategy for making paintings such as Blaze using foraged materials from the western landscape, particularly “ecotones,” or zones where two ecosystems meet. Her painting Snow Mountain, CO used an unexpected combination of acrylic and phosphorescent paint on canvas, brass wire, and beads. She illuminated certain aspects of this landscape painting by using a second phosphorescent image, which appears in darkness or under blacklight, to allude to the duality of the invisible dangers in this sublime terrain.
The works at Tinworks Art represented things that exist at the margins of our ability to perceive them because they are invisible, delicate, or small. Nagle’s panoramic painting Fallow Field pushed the boundaries of this series by immersing the viewer in a vast prairie terrain. Made using the silhouettes of pressed grasses and forbs, it combined the literal and fantastical in one image. Viewers were invited to seek out the hidden aspects of her paintings with blacklight torches.
A Seed to Eat the World 2019/2023
steel; acrylic; mammal, reptile, dinosaur, and human bones
Viewers could gently rotate this large kaleidoscope while looking through the eyepiece. As it turned, bones from mammals, fish, dinosaurs, and humans within it tumbled into new configurations. The bones were refracted in mirrors, creating reflections between beautiful and grotesque. They provoked foresight of evolutionary potential or allowed one to read their own future in scrying visions.
Night Spinning (webs) 2022-2023
translucent and phosphorescent glass beads, brass wire
These were sculptures of actual spider webs Nagle enlarged and beaded out of tiny seed beads and 24-gauge wire. It was a tedious, delicate, meditative process akin to jewelry making. They hung in corners of the room, from the ceiling, and in intersecting clusters. They each responded to the unique qualities of the space and conjecture where an enormous spider might choose to weave.
ABOUT JULIE ANN NAGLE
Julie Ann Nagle is an “unarcheologist,” creating and accumulating layers of narrative for viewers to disassemble.
Her process has two parts: Field Work and Poetic Output. She may research for months before constructing installations for the viewer to explore through interaction. They must engage with her installations as if the experience itself was “field work” for them in the gallery — playing the role of investigator when approaching her projects, to fully engage. The concept of history is prevalent in her work; marginalized, hypothetical, personal, or alternative histories challenge the viewer to reimagine the linear, patriarchal, and monolithic narratives we have inherited in order to better understand our current condition.
Nagle’s work engages with history the way a time-traveler engages with paradox. Her practice defies singularity the way a wormhole defies gravity, and if it were possible to create a burrow somewhere in the space-time continuum, that is exactly where her projects would live.
After receiving her BFA at The Cooper Union School of Art she completed her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has exhibited in group exhibitions at Abrons Art Center, New York, NY; Franconia Sculpture Park, Franconia, MN; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the RISD Museum, Providence, RI; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; BRIC ArtsMedia, Brooklyn, NY; and Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY; among others.
2023 Tinworks Artist Julie Ann Nagle