Exhibition | Intimate Confessions + Awkward Moments in Julie Green’s ‘My New Blue Friends’

PORTLAND, Oregon—We just found this lovely 2015 Upfor Gallery exhibition by Japan-born artist Julie Green. Her first solo exhibition My New Blue Friends features a series of egg tempera-airbrushed panels and porcelain works which read like a visual diary archiving cringe-worthy moments in the artist’s life on heirloom cups and saucers.

Featured image: Julie Green, My New Blue Friend Number Twenty-Seven, 2015, Airbrushed egg tempera on cradled wooden panel, 12 × 14 inches

The gallery writes Green draws inspiration from from “Zen calligraphy, Japanese ceramics and the Pattern and Decoration movement, Green’s work meditates on the ocean, consumption, the color blue and airbrushed imagery.”

Artsy writes the artist also created the backdrop to which her paintings and porcelain works would stand against.

Green’s exhibition features a series of egg tempera-airbrushed panels, hung against a wallpaper of Japanese kozo paper sheets that have been hand-painted with sumi ink. Shells are depicted in the panels and the gallery walls alike, rendered roughly and en masse—a gestural nod to the Pattern and Decoration movement, and an unequivocal meditation on mass consumption.

On the gallery’s window sill is Green’s an Embarrassment of Dishes, a Noritake dinner service for 12 that the artist inherited from her grandmother. Green painted over the original pattern with her drippy, smudgy patterns. On the backside, using a mixture of blue pigment, 7-Up and simple syrup, Green endowed each with an intimate confession of an awkward or embarrassing moment from the her personal history—a record and resource for the artist, comprising an exhaustive visual diary of Green’s daily life dating back to 1993.

Text (edited) from Upfor Gallery.

Do you love or loathe these works from the worlds of contemporary ceramic art and contemporary ceramics. Let us know in the comments.