ARoS Kunstmuseum

Julie Nord

14 Aug - 21 Nov 2010

© Julie Nord
Speaking in tongues, 2008
atercolor, pencil, felttip
76x57
Private Collection
JULIE NORD
"Xenoglossy"

14. August - 21. November 2010

WEST GALLERY

At the exhibition JULIE NORD – XENOGLOSSY, artist Julie Nord (b. 1970) invites us to enter a strange home where nothing looks like you would expect it to. Graceful doll-girls with shiny, almond-shaped eyes, idyllic settings, and cute pets can suddenly transform into grotesque hybrids, flesh-eating plants, and subterranean passages.

Julie Nord is an eminently gifted draughtswoman. In her virtuoso, painstaking drawings executed in pencil, felt tip pens, and ink, as well as in her delicate watercolours and video art, she takes our habitual notions of the homely and the familiar and turns them upside down. In her earlier works spectators were taken down the rabbit hole to a magical underworld – a reference to Lewis Caroll’s Victorian tale about Alice in Wonderland – but this time Julie Nord’s works evoke an imaginative, fanciful and alien parallel world that intervenes with the spaces of reality.
The exhibition shows a range of all-new works by Julie Nord. In a kind of magical social realism she mixes motifs inspired by children’s book illustrations from the 1950s, psychedelic art, outsider art, and gothic marginalia and drolleries.

Xenoglossy is a concept of dubious actual existence. It denotes a particular subset of speaking in tongues where people, caught up in a trance-like state, suddenly speak a language of which they had no prior knowledge. This linguistic phenomenon unfolds itself in Julie Nord’s works by having figures making utterances in an enigmatic, alien language illustrated by psychedelic speech bubbles.

The exhibition is shown at Aros Aarhus Kunstmuseum from 14 August to 21 November 2010 in the West Gallery.
 

Tags: Julie Nord