Doorframe
If I were to name the chief benefit of the house I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
—from The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
Foyer
In Julie Wills’s recent series Subwalls, the raw materials of our constructed lives are reorganized into pictorial assemblages, each built up with layers with drywall, insulation, cardboard, or plywood. Although wall-bound, each piece has a sculptural depth—sometimes up to ten inches—allowing viewers to observe the geology of her surfaces, as well as various small artifacts pressed between their layers. In Blueprint, for example, pale blue silk and the woven edges of housewrap (a vapor barrier used between interior and exterior walls) protrude from a neat stack of chopped cardboard and insulation foam that sandwich them, while the distressed, cobbled-together layers of Event Score preserve hot pink plastic flags, folds of black leather, and hints of a tiny artificial flower. All the Birds of Paradise forms its own corner, angling the strata of its elements directly toward the viewer to form an elegant, linear composition in birch, plaster, and pale green insulation. Although each piece functions as its own composition, the small moments concealed in Wills’s walls suggest that these works are core samples of something larger, something absent.
Niche
Between the layered “pages” of A Book Made of Ice (the pages being drywall, pink foam, cardboard, each scaled to the size of a hardcover), a locator flag extends like a bookmark. Someone’s reading interrupted. On the cover, more layers—of vellum, of chalk, and of text fragments in two different sizes. While the larger is mostly illegible, the smaller neatly produces a mise-en-scène: the snow’s broken crust / the white mound that was our home.
Parlor
In each piece, Wills threads lines of text over and across the work’s various surfaces through the use of small vinyl or dry transfer lettering. Her material choice is crucial: language, one of Wills’s vital mediums, is filtered through the scrim of impersonality, like a label on a filing cabinet. This has the curious effect of withholding any identifiable speaker; we read what seems to be the “voice” of these fragments themselves, as if each has been coerced into speech. Her fragmentary phrasing is poetic, often evoking landscapes or other spaces. At times, the texts conjure scenes of action (running / falling / clambering / up / the / opposite / bank) or in naming, give shape to the formless (the boundaries between colors / a variable pinkish blush).
Study
While the line a variable pinkish blush forms a color through language, the assembled fragments of Subwalls have distinct palettes inherent to the materials themselves, which the artist deftly manipulates. The pinks and greens of insulation, the cold whites of drywall, the warm earth tones of wood—Wills is a gifted composer, and each assemblage is a formalist delight. But each piece also brings with it not only its colors, but its history—everywhere are the incidental marks of the building trades, combined with the “painting” of latex and PVA they traditionally employ. In Subwalls, Wills elevates these histories, positioning them alongside the marks of her hand. In doing so, she links the trade of construction with the art of painting, connecting the craft of the former with the history of the latter.
Staircase
But just whose history, exactly? And what is it that’s being built here? While I’m generally resistant to the limitations of genre, I find myself reading Wills’s pieces not only as paintings, but interiors—the spaces of shelter and solitude within which our inner lives unfold. If it’s the house that protects the dreamer, then it’s the interior that sets the stage for the dream. Are these interior fragments stages upon which we too might dream? High Above Lake Como, Early Spring describes the inner region / which nowhere / touches, while a mass of wire winds its way through the paper, foam, and drywall that compose its base. Wills’s language might describe the interiority of the reader, or it might describe the space hidden under the floorboards. Subwalls likens each to the other, floods them both with the light.
Bedroom
A dream: I lie on my bed, reading Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. Every wall has been stripped down to the studs, and the late afternoon sun moves across floorboards, illuminating the marks and the measurements of the hands who have built this house, long before I came to live here. A tree grows through the floor, its branches extending into open space above my head, and I am neither inside nor outside as I turn the page. Above me, a pair of birds at the ceiling: one whistles, the other answers.
I wake, having slept more soundly than I have in months.
