May 2018, with Geoffrey Hendricks performing “Headstands for Peace”, an event organized by Julie Evanoff in Washington Square Park. More images here.
In Action
Category: About
Bio
Julie Evanoff makes drawings, prints, comics, animations, and toys. She currently lives in Brooklyn, but has lived in many cities across the US. Her artworks have been included in several exhibitions including: Ulrike Müller’s Raw/Cooked, The Brooklyn Museum; Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Brooklyn, NY; The Tool Book Project, curated by Sarah G. Sharp; Collapse, Mississippi State University; If you see nothing say something, The Invisible Dog, Brookly, NY; Julie Evanoff: in between, The Art Institute of Tucson; and Stories real and vividly imagined, Gallery Niklas Belenius, Stockholm, Sweden. She received her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, and her BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.
Co-Founder/Director of Tri-Tryagain Artist/Maker Space And Residency
From 2016-2021 Julie co-directed a collective studio/shop and residency in Ridgewood, Queens. Along with being an active studio space for several artists and makers, every summer using an open call application, Tri-Tryagain offered four artists free workspace, wood and metal shop lessons, group studio visits, and community for 8 weeks.
Reflections on my process
I work in a variety of media including drawing, print-making, comics and animation. Drawing is the foundation of my practice and depending on the project I work from life, reference images, or my imagination. With direct expressionistic lines I aim to capture the essential structure and spirit of figures and forms.
My graphic novel/comics require a highly focused approach to drawing, mostly referencing photos or life. For some comics I design and ink a page in full, for others I draw images (and text) with ink or pencil and scan them into the computer then combine elements and create page spreads to be printed. I work to find metaphors and structures to embody and contain the ideas I’m trying to bring to life while also creating a mood or feeling to bring the reader into the feeling of the concepts.
My daily journal drawings are made without a plan, pencil to paper and draw, inspired by automatic drawing of the Surrealists. Direct lines are laid down quickly and loosely to create narrative instances. A single frame with characters, often human/animal hybrids, that are holding, confronting, biting, or nurturing one another. Or a solitary figure is gesturing toward it’s own fury. Conflict is often present, not resolved, in motion.
My animal drawing practice began years ago from an impulse bordering on obsession to draw them and has evolved to include woodblock prints and small wooden toy animals. I am interested in writing and research that explores the relationship between humans and animals and de-centers the human view. Donna Haraway’s work on inter-species kinship and John Berger’s “Why we look at animals” inspire me. I am looking to connect my animal images to other projects through collaboration.
Contact
Hello! You can reach me by e-mail me at hello [at] julieevanoff [dot] com.
I don’t have titles and details on each image, but I am happy to provide them and/or higher resolution images.
Also feel free to contact me about acquiring works. Thanks!
I build things up. I break things down. I do it again.
I build things up. I break things down. I do it again.
My hand is the throughline in all of my work: drawings, prints, animations, and sculpture.
I draw, driven by the need to scrawl with force and intensity. I do it again. With 6B pencils onto toothy paper. I press hard. I erase. I break things down. I build things up. I do it again.
I draw human/animal hybrid characters that look like futuristic chimera, children’s nightmares, ancient gods, women gargoyles. They hold, confront, and bite each other.
Sometimes I add colored pencils or markers. I build things up.
I make relief carvings. And sculptures. I work with wood. I work with wood that’s had a hard life holding water at the top of buildings in the New York skyline, wood that’s been tromped on by ten thousand feet in Coney Island, wood that’s ready to retire. I chew at this wood with chisels and saws.
I cut out shapes, mostly angular: five sided heads, strong arms, beaks, a dozen legs, a hundred ears, jaws with teeth. I break things down. I sand. I build things up. I stain. I oil. The rough and the detailed. I do it again.
I swap the arms the legs the beaks the heads. Another beak a third beak a forth beak the right beak. Frankensteining them until I recognize the monster on the bench as the monster in my head.
Some have wheels and roll. Some have nice toes. Heads spin. Eyes light up. The chomping rhino, the minimalist hippo, the stacking turtles, the elephant with a magnetic tail, the feminist cyborg with copper tits, the robot with light-up eyes: kids play with them, I do too.
I build things up. I break things down. I do it again.
I make screen prints.
I build things up. I start with geometry. I start with the square. I add a circle. I do it again. I squeegee ink onto the paper through the stencil. I add my hand. I overlap. I juxtapose. I assemble shapes until there is a planetscape of an alien world. Feminst Geometry. I do it again. I hold the paper, somewhat bent and worse with ware. There’s my hand. Always my hand. I end up with almost a square. I end up with a planet where the laws of geometry are slightly different. Feminst Geometry.
I break things down. I squeegee more ink. Noise patterns, unruly beasts, raucous birds, a menagerie of id behind sprocket holes of make-believe film.
I make animations. I draw a picture on a piece of paper. I take a picture of that picture. I erase that picture on that piece of paper. I draw another picture on that piece of paper. I take another picture of that picture. I do it again. You can see the worn marks. I do it again.
I build things up. I break things down. I do it again.