{"id":37172,"date":"2018-02-08T20:45:48","date_gmt":"2018-02-09T02:45:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=37172"},"modified":"2018-09-14T20:32:13","modified_gmt":"2018-09-15T02:32:13","slug":"lydia-gravis-julie-mehretu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/lydia-gravis-julie-mehretu\/","title":{"rendered":"Lydia Gravis & Julie Mehretu"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Julie<\/a>

Julie Mehretu\u2019s \u201cHOWL, eon (I, II)\u201d at the San Francisco Museum of Art.<\/p><\/div>\n

Lydia Gravis<\/a>, an artist who lives and works in Ogden, where she\u2019s gallery director of the Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery at Weber State University, earned her MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design in Boston. The artist she loves, Julie Mehretu, a native of Ethiopia, earned her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, about an hour or so away. Yet Gravis says it took three thesis advisers \u201cto point out the connection between her work and mine. I didn\u2019t used to see it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gravis writes that in the introduction to\u00a0The Persistence of Abstraction<\/em>, author and critic Bob Nickas asked \u201cIf a representational picture offers an image of how the world looks, then doesn\u2019t it fall to abstraction to provide us with an image of how the world feels?\u201d Says Gravis, \u201cIt\u2019s the abstract artists that I usually fall in love with.\u201d<\/p>\n

The large-scale abstract paintings and drawings Mehretu creates leave Gravis \u201cwith a feeling\u2026a sense of energy\u2026a sense of urgency.\u201d She says that like a group of friends confronting one of their members with an obvious crush they keep denying, her grad-school thesis advisors kept pointing out the connections between\u00a0hers and Mehretu\u2019s\u00a0work. \u201cOnce I relented, and started researching Mehretu\u2019s work more and more, I found the similarities. She says that some of her work deals with things that \u2018we don\u2019t have proper language for.\u2019 It also deals with how (politically) charged a landscape can be. Landscape is never just landscape, she says, it\u2019s defined by what takes place on it, what it pays witness to. I think she and I both use repetitive mark-making as a way to find answers,\u201d Gravis observes. \u201cOr perhaps just as a means to respond to the world when there aren\u2019t easy or apparent answers.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy work essentially explores inner landscapes\u2026liminal psychological spaces of human experience that aren\u2019t easily defined. I consider mark-making an empathic endeavor, and find that it connects me to the world around and within me,\u201d she states.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>

\u201cNeither Here Nor There,\u201d Lydia Gravis<\/p><\/div>\n

\n<\/div>\n

In \u201cNeither Here Nor There,\u201d Gravis says she was inspired by \u201dthe enigmatic, but persistent, psychological space that dominates a person\u2019s experience with terminal disease: Combining imagery derived from the biological inscape of the human body with how I imagined the psychological experience of illness to feel, I made this drawing with heavy questions weighing on my mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cQuestions such as: What is the color of grief? What does it feel like to transition through stages of physical decay? Does a person\u2019s sense of self diminish as their body does? These were heavy and uncomfortable questions, but ones that connected me more deeply to the wondrous experience of being alive, and how finite this experience truly is.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lydia Gravis, an artist who lives and works in Ogden, where she\u2019s gallery director of the Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery at Weber State University, earned her MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design in Boston. The artist she loves, Julie Mehretu, a native of Ethiopia, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1600,"featured_media":37173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,2238],"tags":[1890],"class_list":["post-37172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-visual_arts","category-who-do-you-love","tag-lydia-gravis"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Julie-Mehretu-HOWL-eon-I-II.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-14 12:32:19","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1600"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37172"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37541,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37172\/revisions\/37541"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}