Come celebrate the opening of Julie Henson: Character Studies, and meet the artist.

About the exhibition:

The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Character Studies, a large-scale installation of new sculptures and video by the Los Angeles-based artist Julie Henson. Exploring the reciprocal relationship between performer and audience, Henson’s work is invested in the stage as a space for the retelling of parables. 

The artworks in Character Studies are created to evoke emotions produced by extreme abundance and contemporary media culture: the feelings of being simultaneously bewitched and repulsed, isolated and overexposed, and the weight of being constricted, squeezed, or restrained. 

Many of her references generate from an exploration of her early childhood experience attending a hyper-performative megachurch. Utilizing similar strategies of spectacle as a means of expressing culturally shared beliefs, Henson’s installations and sculptures make use of rudimentary theatrical props, stage lights, and costuming to explore how celebrity transitions to idol as the individual seeks commonality in contemporary society through the image of performers. Through use of theatrical tropes, stage materials, and the isolated representation of the body, the installation considers how the construction of self is a product of consuming and reacting to popular culture designed for the screen. In turn, the notion of celebrity—via power, beauty, and wealth—is embodied by the consumer and performed for their audiences in an endless feedback loop that exchanges power between the audience and their chosen idol.