JULIA DAULT | POWER PLANT GALLERY
The Toronto-born and New York City-based artist Julia Dault is presenting her first solo museum exhibition at the Power Plant Gallery in Toronto. The exhibition Color Me Badd, which takes its name from the 90s R&B boy band, echoes the bold aesthetic sensibility of her work. In the works of sculpture and painting, Dault reveals the importance of balancing spontaneous gesture with responsiveness to rules, logic and the constraints of materials. While her sculptural materials recall a Minimalist aesthetic, her process speaks to traditions of performance and site-specific art. Dault's sculptures of Formica and Plexiglas are created in a few hours on-site, rather than over several weeks in the studio.
Every sculpture has a date and a time stamp. On close inspection, the viewer can discern that the work is an index of the artist's labour; work expended in resisting the flat, prostrate tendency of the materials. The rounded and bounded resulting work bulge as if on the cusp of splaying open.
The idea of leaving signs of action on the work is even more evident in Dault’s paintings. Dault uses a painting technique that subtracts the material from the canvas, by peeling back patterns in the paint using various tools, as a way to add transparency and to demystify the painting process.
Julia Dault, Greased Lightning, 2013, Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 18 inches.
"Color Me Badd" is on at the Power Plant Gallery until January 15, 2015.
