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December 2006: Julia Kjelgaard

Julia Kjelgaard’s Roads Less Traveled

by Mary Catherine Johnson, Art History

Julia Kjelgaard is on the road at lot. For more ten years she has been commuting to her teaching job at Emory from her home in Auburn, Alabama. In the days leading up to her current exhibition at Emory’s Visual Arts Gallery, she drove from place to place searching for just the right materials that she needed to complete the work in the exhibition, often returning to the same store numerous times until she found the perfect item. She has traveled the world over, and it was during a 2005 trip to India with her husband, where she spent many hours on the road in motorized rickshaws, that she witnessed the kaleidoscope of colors and images of the Indian landscape that would become the inspiration for her current body of work.

Many Westerners who have traveled the roads in India have no doubt been changed and inspired by the experience, but typically the roads end there. Julia saw what many travelers see: beautiful colors worn by the women, decorated animals, eclectic store displays, and the constant visual stimulation of the markets, temples, flower stalls, pigment sellers, fabric stores, palm leafs, broken sidewalks, traffic jams, and stacks and stacks of everything imaginable, as well as the dirty, crowded, and dusty parade of people, traffic, and sites that boggle the mind and imagination. But the sum of all these things, when filtered through Julia’s mind, became the beginning of an exciting artistic journey that would lead her to several successful exhibitions in the U.S. “I was inspired to re-create my experience of India through art—not in a literal way, but to use the visual language of colors, texture, space, and form to address the most important learning experience I had in India—that of simultaneity and diversity, and the potential to hold conflicting points of view concurrently without judgment,” Julia explains. “ India is the extreme co-existence of contrast between rich and poor, order and chaos, and past and future. In my new paintings and prints, I am using both an old vocabulary and a new one to touch upon the way all things are interconnected. While the subject matter looks like it is about India, for me it is actually about untapped capabilities and the opportunity to expand and enrich our lives beyond measure with what other cultures have to teach us. I wanted the works to reflect the contrasts and complexities of India, so I decided to use a combination of technologies: high-end archival digital printing, traditional oil painting, and non-traditional hand work through embroidery and threading.”

Julia is on the faculty of the Visual Arts Program at Emory, primarily teaching Drawing & Painting courses. The drive between Atlanta and Auburn can be long and stressful, and Julia has found herself wondering more than once, as she sat in a traffic jam or paid inflated gas prices, if the hassles of a long commute are worth it. The answer continues to be affirmative: “The students at Emory are a big factor in what keeps me coming back,” she says. “They are very engaging, intelligent, and open-minded, and my exchanges with them often inform my own work. On many occasions what I teach in the classroom turns out to be exactly what I need to learn myself.” Emory has also played a major role in Julia’s career as an artist, providing significant grants that have allowed her to explore new media and technologies in her work.

Julia has not always been an artist. Earlier in her adult life she followed paths that led her in other directions, but it was art that ultimately became her vehicle of choice for navigating life and expressing herself. “When I am making art I am at my most honest,” she explains. “The materials I use allow me to speak in a way that is ultimately more true than mere words can offer.” She attended art school at a time when conceptual art was highly valued, and as a result she learned to spend a lot of time thinking about what her art was communicating. “I still spend a great deal of time thinking about what my work will be, and I seek out materials that can be used in a poetic way, so that the work becomes not about the materials themselves but about the ideas they evoke. It is important for me to get a message across to the viewer.” In addition, an affinity for Eastern art, particularly Japanese woodcuts, has influenced how Julia thinks about space and concepts in her art, and her travels throughout the world over the past twenty years have provided images and ideas for much of her work.

In the first months of 2007 Julia will be on the road once again, returning to India on a Fulbright Research Grant for six months to undertake a documentary project about small storefronts and to work on a series of new prints and paintings. Taking six months out from an already busy life with a husband in Alabama and a teaching job at Emory might seem like a strange and difficult prospect to many people, but this is the path that Julia has gladly chosen, and will continue to travel for the foreseeable future. And that has made all the difference.

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Julia Kjelgaard’s exhibition, Transforming Experience: The India Dream Works, will be on display at Emory’s Visual Arts Gallery through January 27, 2007. For more information, please contact Mary Catherine Johnson, 404-712-4390 or mcjohn7@emory.edu.

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