Exquisite Corpse is the second volume in the Apophenia series of artist's books by Julie Wolfe which function as extensions of her studio practice, bridging the tactile and conceptual, the personal and the collective. Her world is a strange technicolour dreamscape where time, place, and authorship blur. Ordinary moments gain glamour, while impressive images turn eerie. The artist scans, paints and reprints archival images, transforming them into futuristic collages and altered visuals that question beauty, value and meaning.
By recontextualising what was once deemed worth preserving, she revives and reframes it, exploring new associations and defamiliarising the familiar to shift our perceptions. This is the second volume in her series of artist's books, which function as extensions of her studio practice, bridging the tactile and conceptual, the personal and the collective.
From the publisher:
In this particular volume, the sequel to Wolfe’s 2023 Apophenia, the artist homes in on modes of seduction, often in relation to personal identity. Drawing on conventional images of beauty—fashionable Western women, high classical art, exquisite botanicals, luxe objects—she simulates the visual excess of the beau ideal that surrounds us every day. What kind of perfection, what desired reality, do we strive for, she appears to ask, given the seemingly incidental but wholly deliberate images filtering through our world for constant consumption? Wolfe cuts through this noise with her layered gestures, slicing images and recombining them, or adding shadows or gloriously garish colors, creating surprising aberrations from accepted or established forms. In essence, she turns to the grotesque, as theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin, inverting or overturning hierarchies and bringing together otherwise discrete realms. Her destabilizing or distorting of our sense of order—our dominant ways of understanding —can be gratifying, wondrous, funny, even estranging. In embracing what Wolfgang Kayser described as the “ominous tension” of the grotesque, her art awakens our imagination and coaxes us toward deeper emotional and unbounded ways of seeing.
Apophenia Press, 236pp, 26cm x 33cm, illustrated paperback, numbered in a limited edition of 300
