"home / work : paintings, picture-thinking & notes in progress”

Artists Rodney McMillian and Julia Fish join exhibition co-curator Caitlin Haskell, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, in conversation about Cezanne. Cezanne sought to develop a visual language that could fully translate his intense feelings into paintings. In doing so, he opened up possibilities that were embraced and elaborated by artists in his time and into the present. Julia Fish and Rodney McMillian, both of whom contributed to the exhibition catalogue, will explore Cezanne’s art-making practice and why it continues to resonate.

Artists Rodney McMillian and Julia Fish join exhibition co-curator Caitlin Haskell, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art in conversation about Cezanne. Julia Fish and Rodney McMillian, both of whom contributed to the exhibition catalogue, will explore Cezanne’s art-making practice and why it continues to resonate.

Some months back, I received a kind invitation on your behalf: would I take a look at your Three Skulls (Trois Crânes)—the watercolor’d one—to note some thoughts and then, prospectively, to further shape my “seeing” for intended publication? My “yes” confirmed: it would be an honor and a privilege. 

Fish’s artworks elude every attempt to enclose them in language, and they resist explanation. They become something only a painting can be.

This essay was written in March 2020 after the exhibition Julia Fish : bound by spectrum closed at the DePaul Art Museum.

Now, six months later, our lives have been dramatically altered and constrained. Wracked by devastating losses from the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenges posed by current political realities and perilous climate changes, many of us, limited to virtual screens,
have sheltered in place. During days of self-quarantine, our surroundings have become spaces of confinement and refuge. Julia Fish’s attentive representation of domestic realities
and infinite, even metaphysical transformations become imaginative models for how we might experience this elongated moment.

Paradoxically, looking at these artworks, based on spectral precision and poetic revision, we are compelled to consider existence beyond the frames.
Fish’s gorgeous thresholds, always prescient, are even more urgent.

John Yau of Hyperallergic reviwes Julia Fish's recent survey at the DePaul Art Museum, bound by spectrum. Yau celebrates Fish's keen observation and rigorous commitment to the "small sensations" of her physical space. He notes the uniqueness of her practice which "collapses the long-held fiction that painters paint and conceptual artists think." Fish's steadfast mapping of her own domestic space is ever more relevent during quarantine, Yau explains, as her work questions: "how far does any one of us have to go in order cross the threshold from one space (or world) to another? What does it mean to pay attention to what is underfoot, to our passage in the familiar, ever-changing spaces of everyday life? How does invention differ from production?"  

Review of the artist's show Bound by Spectrum at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, IL. 

Review of Julia Fish: Floret at David Nolan Gallery.

Review of Threshold II at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of Between: Stairs and Landings at Rhona Hoffman Gallery