Julie York
Info 800-563-7632
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Julie York’s eight small ceramic works at SOFA (at the Perimeter Gallery booth) have a conceptual edge, playing with perception and juxtaposing the recognizable with the mysterious. Though her pieces look mass-produced–most elements are cast from manufactured objects or fragments of them, then sanded for hours–they’re obviously not functional. One untitled work looks something like a doorknob, fusing a conical shape with a globular one. On the flat circular face at the end of the cone is a condenser lens that allows you to see a phallic object inside–but the lens shrinks it, creating a perceptual frisson. Incorporating lenses is an outgrowth of pieces York did in grad school, when she began using fish tanks filled with mineral oil to display her ceramic cosmetic containers, female figurines, and breast-shaped cupcakes: she likes the illusions refraction creates, and mineral oil has greater refractive properties than water.
York used to think she couldn’t become an artist. “I always thought artists were born, and that if you didn’t know how to draw well you couldn’t become one.” As a dyslexic, she also felt different from other kids. Though she took classes at a community college trying to find a field she was interested in, she says, “I was more interested in going out with friends, going to bars, and snowboarding.” After a few ceramics courses, however, she started to fall in love with the material and learned that “you have to make 100 pots in order to make one good one.” She transferred to art school, and two years after getting a BFA started graduate school at Alfred University, where she received an MFA in 2000. Today she thinks of dyslexia as a “real advantage for me as an artist,” allowing her to understand that “everyone’s perception is unique.”
