Julie Berry, “She Clicks”

When she talks about her painting, Julie Berry calls it “an adventure,” which is a pleasure to hear. Art is properly always an adventure, in the sense that the real artist begins with the modesty to admit she doesn’t know and can’t always control where she will end up. Berry’s curiosity, a great source of adventure, has taken her in pursuit of many subjects and media, and in Every Face, A Story, it’s her perspective on art as storytelling, and the cumulative experience that enables her to employ multiple media, that together hit the sweet spot. That’s to say that on entering the downstairs gallery at Bountiful Davis Art Center, the viewer just might be immediately charmed by what they find.

Consider, for example, “She Clicks,” in which a woman with an SLR camera confronts viewers as if she is about to take, or has just taken, their picture. The direct, frontal manner of her gaze is so powerful that the viewer may not immediately notice how her face is actually turned ever so slightly down and to the side. This suggests that she was just checking her camera, while her eyes, drawn in perspective so her pupils are not centered in their irises, have just turned up to check her subject directly. These elements of the portrait’s story help bring it to life. They are also the only parts that initially seem painted, both the photographer’s dress and background having been collaged together from various decorative papers and photographic images that, again on closer inspection, are seen to be painted as well, while the ribbon in her dress is real and doing a job pretty much what it was made to do.

Installation view of Every Face, A Story by Julie Berry at Bountiful Davis Art Center

Julie Berry’s collection of works depicting The Holy Family.

There are 25 in Every Face, A Story, and each one of them rewards this level of close inspection. One can follow there the journey of adventure the artist took, the choices she made as she layered materials into and on top of one another. Layers are both subject and technique in today’s mixed media, so they may be found in both the life represented and the way it is shown. Four of the portraits are a set, on the theme of bees and the hexagonal structures they create. (There probably should be six, but who’s counting?) Titled, from the top, “Thoughts in the Hive,” “Queen Bee,” “Thoughts and Honey,” and “Bee Happy,” the somber expressions on their faces don’t immediately square with the theme of joy through labor, and I found myself wondering about that traditional theme and the hierarchical institutions that advocate it.

Yet the value of a direct encounter with the sacred, rather than going through intermediaries, seems to play a part in the portraits that occur among nine scenes from the story of the Holy Family. In these, embossed, metallic papers serve the traditional roles of gold leaf seen in both medieval altar panels and Orthodox icons. By connecting the symbology of icons that have their painted saints set in framing devices made of jewels and gold to her modern craftspersons—the baker, embroiderer, and a couple of gardeners—she stitches together notions of the well-lived life from tradition and the present. In “Hums the Word,” which like “She Clicks” employs language playfully to make a point, the idea of listening carefully not just to Nature, but to Creation, is elevated.

The complexity of some of these collages raises the question of how much attention the viewer should pay to the structuring of layers. Just when it seems that some of the most elaborate effects achieve invisibility—the painted hand holding the collaged apple in “Temptation” should perhaps be given the respect owed to a professional magician, whose tricks defy unraveling and are spoiled when revealed—along comes the fellow in “A Life Well Lived,” whose painted hair and beard have a layer of threads sewn over them, while many of his personal effects, including his tattoo, are appliquéd fabric prints. These potential metaphors call out for attention. Finally, the device that is most likely to put off some audience members—the repeated frontal composition and direct confrontation between subject and viewer—permits a number of gestures of offering: that apple and the cups in “Love You to the Moon” and “Sip Happens.” The thought occurs that all the portraits, as opposed to the Biblical episodes, perhaps, are making an offering of themselves, as examples of satisfactory living in a certain time and place. Stitched and glued together as they are, out of found and created parts, their lives are like prayers, spoken silently but in the language of plain sight.      

Every Face, A Story, Bountiful Davis Art Center, Bountiful, through Dec. 22.

All images courtesy of the author.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.