Julie Langsam - Selections from Landscape Interventions: 500+ Drawings
Exhibition Receptions: Friday, June 2nd, 2023 5-8 pm and Friday, July 7th, 5-8 pm
Gallery Hours: Wednesdays 1-4 (schedule may vary) and by appointment through August 13th.
Deep Dive Art Projects is thrilled to welcome Julie Langsam back to Cleveland to show Selections from Landscape Interventions: 500+ Drawings through August 13th. A longtime faculty member at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Langsam was part of the Cleveland art community from 1996, and was the former Motto Endowed Chair and Head of Painting at CIA . Since 2009, Langsam has been an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, NJ.
Throughout her 35-year career Julie Langsam has examined issues of beauty, idealization and the notion of the sublime, as well as the interconnected legacy of stylistic tropes, in work that spans painting, drawing, filmmaking, photography, and printmaking. Langsam often combines images that reference both the romantic sublime of the 19th century and the 20th century’s utopian ideals of modernism as a way to examine ideas about ‘nature’ and ‘progress’ within the context of the 21st century. Langsam recently finished a short experimental documentary film about the landscape of New Jersey called “Garden State” and is editing her feature-length film about the United States as seen through the lens of the landscape.
"As an artist who has used the landscape as a lens through which to examine ideas of utopian/dystopian visions of/for the future, embedded power, hegemony, and legacy for over 25 years, I realized that I knew very little about my own country and its people-- their hopes and dreams, their way of life, their beliefs, their longings, their disappointments. I began to realize that the only way to understand this was to travel to these places I was unfamiliar with--- places where beliefs, ideologies and a way of life were very different from mine," says Langsam, "I grew up in New York City with all the advantages of a major international metropolis at my fingertips, but by 2018 I began to understand in a much deeper way that this was its own form of provincialism."
In 2018 Langsam set out on the first of two 3-month long trips to document the landscape of the United States. On that first trip she had taken some ‘live’ photos---a static frame, yet with movement and sound. On the second trip, in 2021, Langsam and a cinematographer traversed over 30,000 miles across the country, and discovered that the landscape itself can tell the stories embedded within a place --- as land --- its uses and purposes, both historical and contemporary can be seen as flashpoints for various ideologies and beliefs. Deeply rooted within the landscape are issues of sovereignty, agency, ownership, and stewardship of land and natural resources. The in-process, feature-length experimental/documentary film will show that etched into the earth are the traces of lives lived, stories told, histories created, and histories destroyed.
The photo/drawings shown at Deep Dive Art Projects, are based on stills from the film, and form the basis for the ongoing “Landscape Interventions: 500+ Drawings” series and will continue until the film is completed. Says Langsam, "Ultimately, these drawings form a kind of blueprint or sketch for the film----they are about intervention/interference---a symbol of my own marks on the landscape, which through their formalist interventions become potent signifiers of the legacy of our collective human impact on the environment."
Langsam has exhibited nationally and internationally. Solo exhibitions include Gallery Thomas Jaeckel; Frederieke Taylor Gallery; and Michael Steinberg Fine Art in NYC; Maass Gallery at SUNY Purchase; Espai 8 in Barcelona; Reykjavik Art Gallery, Iceland; and Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, among others. She is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and is represented in collections throughout the United States and Europe. Among Langsam's other activities she is curator of such exhibitions as "Color as Structure" at Frederieke Taylor Gallery in NYC and "The Big Bang" at SPACES Gallery in Cleveland, OH.
More about Langsam's project can be found here.
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