Everyday Poses explores the fine line between our dream world and reality. The figures and creatures inhabiting Julie Mauskop’s canvases directly reference her inner thoughts, unvoiced desires and deep imagination. Mauskop, who is soft-spoken and gentle-natured in person, primarily depicts the tension between social interaction and isolation. She presents intimate moments and veiled thoughts for the gaze of the viewer. Her paintings evoke feelings of being an outsider, and the characters she gives life to drift between abstraction and more realistic portrayals. Whether human, alien, animal or something in between, there is always a sense of longing for connection in her works.
Julie Mauskop’s protagonists are more often than not nebulous, having eyes but few other discernible facial features aside from a stray tongue or an implied ear. The environments she sets her subjects into manifest as shifting color fields and bright atmospheric hazes that make few references to the real world aside from the insertion of pillows. These pillows interact and dance with her figures, allude to human body parts and insinuate a subtle sexuality while floating in space or caressing arms, legs and faces. Pillows are traditionally an emblem of rest, but in Mauskop’s paintings they come to life and are begging for play.
The artist’s unconscious mind draws upon bodies, or more accurately body parts, to create extremely personal stories. The figures presented are distorted, but the narratives are recognizable and relatable to us as the onlooker. Mauskop’s color palette is chosen intuitively and quietly informs the temperament and feeling of the moments she has frozen in time. In several works, an even more surreal air is created as creatures are seen with rows of tongues along their spines, giant eyeballs, lips on their chests, or entwined in groups with multiple boneless, flowing limbs. The overall effect is of time stopped during dreams seeking to flow into reality.
Julie Mauskop (b. 1986, Brooklyn, NY) received a BFA in Painting from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2009, a MA Degree in Art Therapy from NYU in 2013 and completed her MA Degree in Fine Art at Luca School of Arts in Brussels in 2017. Everyday Poses is her first solo exhibition with SHRINE.
