Covidia

Covidia: Art Created During the Pandemic by Julie Maren

Bricolage Gallery 

Art Parts Creative Reuse Center

2860 Bluff Street, Boulder, CO 80301

October 9-November 21, 2020

Admission: Free

Review by Madeleine Boyson

Sculptor and painter Julie Maren wants to know what we’re making of it all. Prompted in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s onslaught of socio-political upheaval has taught us about our fears, vices, loyalties, and internalized systems. In Covidia, a small but whimsical exhibition at Bricolage Gallery, on view inside Boulder’s Art Parts Creative Reuse Center until November 21, Maren explores another lesson of 2020: that is, our deeply human impulse to continue creating, no matter the crisis at hand.

Julie Maren, Hotspot, 2020, acorn tops, mica, acrylic, and brass. Image by Madeleine Boyson.

Covidia samples Maren’s artistic response to the COVID-19 disaster. The exhibition features works made or transformed only since March 2020, when most American cities were ordered into lockdown. Within parameters set by quarantine and the materials she already had at home, Maren explores the anxieties and evocations of a viral pandemic through drawing, sculpture, and painting. The title “Covidia” conjures an image of a not-so-fictional dreamworld in which a respiratory coronavirus is the defining factor of daily life. Using her work as a therapy through which to make sense of it all, [1] the artist experiments with new forms while also bending her pre-existing styles. Her well-known “Biophilia” forms, for example, which are made of acorn tops, mica, and brass mounted in clusters, appear in a COVID-centric, cleverly titled piece called Hotspot.

Julie Maren, Journal Entries 1-6, 2020. Image by Madeleine Boyson.

Despite the cramped Bricolage Gallery space, which comprises a single corner of the larger Art Parts shop, the artist’s disaster response still tracks the U.S. pandemic experience over time. Left of the Bricolage wall, Journal Entries 1-6 chronicle Maren’s—and the world’s—anxieties surrounding the health crisis. Words like “hallucinatory,” “invasion,” and “everything is coming apart” are scrawled amongst painted neon plant shapes on notebook paper and evoke the florid panic that spread in early March.

Julie Maren, Covid Experiment #1: Red Forms, 2020, wood, rubber, and acrylic. Image by Madeleine Boyson.

Julie Maren, Mutations, 2020, terracotta. Image by Madeleine Boyson.

Moving right, the viewer meets with Maren’s wall mounts and smaller table pieces, which further stretch viral forms. In Covid Experiments #1-3, the artist plays with biological cylinders; the wooden Red Forms, for instance, pile up on the glass display counter like magnified red blood cells. On the wall above is Mutations, a terracotta installation that mimics natural organisms, this time with balls of various sizes sculpted to look either like viral agents or coral reefs. With these works, Maren expands the initial panic of Journal Entries into a larger curiosity about the disease’s true form.

A detail image of Julie Maren, Silver Linings, 2020, mica, gesso, and aluminum. Image by Madeleine Boyson.

Maren’s arguably most successful work, however, is in the mica-laden Silver Linings on the right-most Bricolage wall. Here the artist comes to a conclusion the rest of the exhibition has only danced around: there are benefits, perhaps even bright spots, to the pandemic. As the artist shares on her website, the immense uncertainty all around necessitates introspection and we are “compelled...to look for the positive sides...however small they may be.” [2] For Maren, this has manifested in the time alone to work, the space to be curious, and the practice of art as medicine. The artist therefore uses shiny materials like mica and aluminum to prompt viewers into self-reflection of a similar kind. Silver Linings hangs delicately from its mount and wispy forms glisten like human fingerprints or tiny mirrors, asking: now that we’re here, what will we create with what we’ve learned?

Madeleine Boyson is an independent writer, curator, lecturer, and artist located in Denver, Colorado. In her scholarship she concentrates on American modernism and (dis)ability studies, including issues of care and dependency as well as the wholeness of the body. She has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art History and History from the University of Denver.

[1] According to the artist’s statement on the gallery’s website: https://www.artpartsboulder.org/bricolage.

[2] From the artist’s statement on her website: https://www.juliemaren.com/silver-linings.