Julie Henson: Character Studies
October 15–December 18, 2021
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.
Julie Henson (b. 1983 in Charleston, SC) lives and works in Los Angeles. Henson received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2011. Solo exhibitions include the Neon Museum, Las Vegas, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, the Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina, Yes Ma’am Projects, Denver, and SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York. Henson has participated in group shows at numerous museums and spaces including Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art, Los Angeles, the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance; and the Visual Art Center at the University of Texas, Austin.
Henson’s work has been reviewed in the pages of The Steidtz Magazine, Elephant Magazine, Artforum, and Hyperallergic. She was a 2017 nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Award and 2019 Artist in Residence at The Neon Museum, Las Vegas and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson.
