JULIE GREEN
Biography
Julie Green’s connection with the art world started early, as she is distantly related to the sculptor Ruth Azawa. Having spent her childhood participating in Azawa’s various workshops for children, Julie began her artistic journey.
Julie was awarded a student grant two years in a row and attended summer classes at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, studying under the tutelage of master night photographer Steve Harper.
Educated by Jack Welpott, Don Worth, and Robin Lasser, Julie earned a BFA from San Francisco State University. After collage, Julie ran her own studio photographing the vibrant San Francisco rock 'n' roll scene for multiple record labels.
Concurently, Julie was an intern at Jean-Louis Pierson's Show ‘n Tell Gallery and spent many hours assisting conceptual artist David Ireland with his Capp Street project. She also co-founded the San Francisco Society of Female Photographers, which hosted group exhibitions and gave female photographers a safe platform to shoot night photography in the city.
In 1999 she moved to Los Angeles, where for the next decade she completed two important bodies of work: The Mask Series and Toyland which helped her to digest the not so subtle change from the social norms in Northern California to her new home in Southern California.
Over the 2010's, Julie began to concentrate on and push the two-dimensional surface of her images by puncturing, weaving, stitching, and embroidering into her photographs. From experiments in photographing shadows in paper constructions, detritus in plaster, to digital images incorporating text and weaving portraits, Julie's artwork began to shift toward a more textural state. Fleeting Perspectives: A Paper Ballet and Home as Hat - Flora as Fashion are prime examples of this decade of exploration.
Not satisfied with the constant struggle to create a 3-dimensional object out of a 2-dimensional medium, and completely exhausted from the overstimulation and heavy bombardment of imagery in our social media obsessed world, Julie turned to constructing abstract relief forms in 2020.
Working with physical space, shadow, depth, and light, the new medium has given Julie the freedom to explore relationships between patterns and fluctuating tones in abstract relief in hopes of giving the viewer a respite from the pounding visual throngs of representation through the joy of watching the interaction of light and shadow during a time of heightened global uncertainty.