SANCTUARY OF CROW SONG
September 21 - October 5, 2024
The use of diverse materials and textures, ranging from leather to hair to large-scale paintings, further emphasizes the immersive nature of the island. Sculptural works evoke the fantastical vegetation and beings that populate this world, suggesting that our bodies and histories are inextricably linked to the land itself. This interplay of materials dares viewers to consider the ways in which different aspects of our identities coexist and shape our reality. These visual narratives blend the line between fiction and reality, using magic and fantasy to reflect the complexities of queer identity.
Julia’s characters, living in her paintings are often seen as devils or deities, angels and ghosts, with unique bodies engaged to explore the intriguing beauty of personal histories showing us each character’s fleeting intimacy and delicate intricacy. With each artwork Julia composes a visual map, and with this guide we embark on a journey through those characters. While the works contain an element of pictorial representation, it is the abstraction found throughout that emphasizes the confusing borders, melding boundaries, blurred and morphing lines which leads one to explore and meditate the multiple realities around us. Through these dynamic characters, Julia reclaims trauma and redefines concepts of space, home, and family, with a focus on queer identity.
Sanctuary of Crow Song is a celebration of resilience, transformation, and the power of community. It is an invitation to enter a new world—a sacred space where joy holds suffering, creation emerges from destruction, and the queer community finds yet another home.
EXHIBITION TEXT
ArtBug in collaboration with Casa Lü (Mexico City) is pleased to present Sanctuary of Crow Song, an exhibition of recent artworks by Julia Cella (b. 1998, Boston, MA.) Sanctuary of Crow Song represents Julia Cella’s first solo exhibition and features never before exhibited paintings and abstractions made during this year in Barcelona, where Julia currently resides.
Centered on a fantasy known as The Island, Julia provides a sacred utopian queer reality which is home to a richly layered narrative that invites us into a world where joy, suffering, love and power intertwine like braids in a lush healthy head of hair. With the use of various materials such as real and synthetic hair, we are invited to explore The Island for ourselves, piecing together the story of a young girl, who burdened by despair severs her braids and buries them in the fertile clay of the earth.
It is from this courageous act of desperation, that a fantastical island emerges, a queer utopia. The brilliantly hot and fertile surface encompasses a dark, cavernous interior. The Island serves as a sanctuary, a place where trauma is both acknowledged and transformed into a source of creative power. The central tenet of the exhibition, “I Will Help Hold Your Haunted,” speaks to the collective strength found in confronting and embracing past traumas. As the inhabitants of this island meet their own histories, they become nearly divine, harnessing the energy of pain to reshape their new world.
