Julie Voyce

J_3
Grade One 2001 screenprint

J_2
Sample 2000 screenprint

J_5
Frost 2001 screenprint

J_4
North 2002 screenprint

J_7
Sun 2002 screenprint

- L.M. 12-17-2006 7:41 pm

I like the not-quite-abstract quality of these and the overall punchiness considering how ambiguous the subject matter is. I'm responding to them as "web art"--what is the scale of the prints?
- tom moody 12-17-2006 8:02 pm


The second one from the bottom is labeled 7.5 in x 5.5 in. the rest are 14" x 10", (but I'm wondering if those proportions are correct.) You're right, they do work as web art, probably because of her analytical approach to colour and the logic of screen printing. Her whole body of work is remarkable because she blends an incredibly sophisticated pictorial sense with imagery that's absolutely fucking bonkers.
- L.M. 12-17-2006 8:27 pm


An excerpt from a catalogue essay I wrote several years ago:

Work, work, work. This is the engine that runs Julie Voyce. Her prints, full of cartoonish joie de vivre, are the product of a rigorous, labour-intensive process. Subjecting her printmaking practice to sets of strict parameters, Voyce is continually pushing her media and her approach. The prints in this show are from a body of work that employs only orange, transparent cyan, and black inks. Voyce has restricted her palette in order to push her own limits, and has decided not to introduce any other colours until she has a very good reason. Says Voyce, "There are dividends when you stick to your art and work for a number of years. The work becomes an entity in itself and starts talking to you about what to do next. You learn to trust it, and do what it tells you."

The results are damn good art. Frost is one of my favourites, an almost-landscape with active, bounded areas of crystals and stripes that abut and intersect. Planes of blue orange and green, alive with marks and direction, both flatten and recede, in a satisfying abstraction that is so very nearly figurative. Sun includes a batch of strange crystalline shapes, weird hard and pointy sun dogs, that emerge in a cloud of brownish black dark smoke, billowing from a burst of light. All planes are bounded, yet their energy expands beyond the edges. It's a bursting kind of kinetic tension that produces an exhilarating feeling of buoyancy and ever bubbling potential. Time and meaning are fluid, muscular and always on the move. Prints are a fix, a freeze of fluid inks, a distilled emotional gesture, an instant of a vision or idea. In Voyce's words, "The world is in flux, you are in flux, and you are trying to records moments in that flux."


- sally mckay 12-17-2006 8:50 pm


I was hoping you'd pipe in with your catalogue essay, you have probably done one of the best pieces of writing on her process.
- L.M. 12-17-2006 9:32 pm


aah, thanks! Julie Voyce rocks hard.
- sally mckay 12-17-2006 11:20 pm


Dueling slideshows?
- J@simpleposie (guest) 12-18-2006 12:37 am


No, Sally & I are too much like Chip 'n Dale to fight a duel over anything.
- L.M. 12-18-2006 1:31 am


Just hopin' you don't stop doin' whatever it is you're duelin'.
- J@simpleposie (guest) 12-18-2006 6:22 am


Er, I mean not duelin'.
- J@simpleposie (guest) 12-18-2006 6:23 am


chip&D2chip&D1
- sally mckay 12-18-2006 9:32 pm


Why thank you ever so much! Now I will politely take my turn at dropping a walnut on your head.

!Knob

chipdale2
- L.M. 12-18-2006 9:44 pm


ow! duellist.
- sally mckay 12-18-2006 10:19 pm





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