Living In Upgrade Culture: Julia Christensen

Informer

I’ve known Julia Christensen for quite a long time, since we were both graduate students at Mills College in Oakland in fact. One of my first memories of her was when we were both in Pauline Oliveros’s composition class.

Since then, I’ve kept up with Julia’s work on and off over the years, seeing her when she would exhibit in town or by catching up at artist retreats in upstate New York. I think it’s the expansiveness of her work that has always intrigued me most, leaping from the micro to the macro with ease. Ranging from her studies and photography of how local communities creatively re-use defunct “big box” stores to now creating work intended to communicate life on earth to beings in other galaxies, she is driven by getting to the bottom of things, even if that means interrogating possibilities alongside jet propulsion engineers.

What I love about artists with a research-based practice is that they look outside themselves for answers and then fearlessly shift their focus as new revelations emerge. Like Julia, artists who work this way bring a quality of real-time investigation and appraisal to their work. This faith in process, constantly creating from the elements discovered whatever they may be, strikes me as having the quality of altruism, something shared among all the artists I admire.