Julie VonDerVellen’s sculptural weavings and paintings transform and translate the experience of reading. With her textile-inspired surfaces richly embedded with the visual information of abstract watercolor, acrylic, and chalk pastels, she suggests that the act of reading need not have a finite beginning and end. Instead, this exhibition reminds us that narrative, just like our lived experience, can lilt back and forth from past to present, and also exist in the space in between. Julie’s impulse to document landscape and travel in a journalistic sense through painting is tempered by her propensity to revel in ambiguity with her abstract weavings.

Julie notes, “My work redefines the traditional book structure while narrating the union between emotion and memorization. The intangible marriage of influential moments and correlating responses are conveyed through intricate textile-inspired surfaces. Sculptures, collages, and paintings document landscapes, relationships, successes and tribulations…As the fibers warp and weft into spatial and temporal narratives, pixel-like patterns emerge…The repeating columns and rows parallel the psychological dissection, analyzation, mending, and reimagining of these moments – resulting in a visual and physical sense of respite.”