A solo exhibition by Julia Jacquette, Fine Arts, titled Unrequited and Acts of Play, has moved to the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (VACNJ), in Summit, NJ, and will be on display through January 18, 2018; it opened on September 22. This is the second stop for the show; it originated at the Wellin Museum in Clinton, NY, where it was on display in the spring of 2017. The exhibition and the artwork included in it were featured in a recent New York Times article, “The Secret Art Language of New York Playgrounds.”
From the exhibition summary at VACNJ:
Exposing our insatiable longing for the ideal, the work of Julia Jacquette, who is based in New York and Amsterdam, focuses on commercialized objects of desire: liquor and food, ornate interiors of the wealthy, shimmering swimming pools, and deceptively flawless women. Utilizing images from glossy lifestyle magazines, luxury brand catalogs, and 1950s and 1960s cookbooks, Jacquette renders these objects with photorealist precision, often in views so close that the subject becomes abstracted. Her crisply detailed paintings question the seductive attraction of consumer goods, the unattainable perfection of feminine beauty, and the ways that advertising influences our feelings of identity and self-worth.
Original gouache drawings from Jacquette’s graphic memoir, Playground of My Mind, will be on view concurrently in the Joe and Marité Robinson Strolling Gallery. Providing a distinctive account of the artist’s childhood, the book is inspired by the “adventure playgrounds” of the 1970s that encouraged constructive, imaginative play. In this memoir, Jacquette acknowledges the influence of these and other design principles that she absorbed growing up in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s.
A video describing the exhibition and Jacquette’s memoir, Playground of My Mind, was produced by the Wellin Museum and can be found here:
For more information, contact Jacquette, 212 217.5891.