Action, Ritual, and Ephemerality: Julia Goodman and the (de)Appropriation Wall Posted on May 14, 2009 by Adrienne Skye Roberts
We have an innate desire to preserve things: spaces, objects, memories. Preservation implies a sanctification, a remove from touch, and guard against eventual decay. Public spaces are redeveloped, graffiti is removed, and a new coat of paint added. Art objects, once delicately handmade, are often removed from touch by display cases and the demarcated spaces of museums.
Local artist Julia Goodman is interested in interrupting this process through a focus on ephemerality, ritual, and meditations on time. Goodman’s art practice consists of collecting junk mail once a week from her neighbors in Bernal Heights and transforming the junk mail into cast handmade paper sculptures. Her practice is multi-dimensional: community oriented as she travels door to door collecting paper and studio based as she engages in the laborious process of carving wood, making and casting paper. Goodman’s piece “Eleven Month Mourning Project: August 19, 2007 – July 14, 2008″ is representative of her dynamic process and adds a public dimension to her practice. Goodman created “Eleven Month Mourning Project” as a way of providing herself time to mourn the loss of her father. The foundation of the project is the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish ritual of reciting a prayer in the presence of others for eleven months after the death of a parent.
For each month Goodman created a series of handmade cast paper sculptures and with this work engaged in public art actions, wheat-pasting one piece each day in a public space. The forms of her sculptures–birds in flight, phases of the moon, arrows depicting wind patterns, and sailboats–are a coded language of impermanence and often intangible movement. In Goodman’s words they represent a “different way of navigating through space.” In a more direct symbol, Goodman created a series of silhouettes of John F. Kennedy, Jr. saluting during his father’s funeral; an image that became a national icon of mourning and speaks to the experience of a bereaved child.
