Julie Lipa - Room 318
I'm a Detroit-born artist who recreates mistakes in history using Mid-century comic books, historical journalism, and vintage artifacts.
My relationship with recycling began in Detroit, Michigan, where my parents introduced me to garbage picking. Fascinated by the treasures found in discarded items, I became preoccupied with things people threw away.
My interest in art came later thanks to an art class at Macomb County Community College. I had a charismatically wacky electro-kinetic teacher who turned my brain inside out. He taught me the basics of color and composition, but most importantly, how to see things differently.
During this time, I began salvaging 1950s portable TVs, which I later transformed into functional art—creating wine racks, chests of drawers, and end tables. My earliest series called the “Disaster Series”, featured mounted TV faces to showcase images of accidents, inspired by Warhol.
Ultimately I needed to make the rent instead of making art, so I founded an entertainment marketing agency that integrated real-life brands into films, television shows and other content. Two decades later, I returned to my art, using the vintage TVs I had stored to create my solo show “Beneath Perfection: The Underside of America’s Mid-Century Belle Époque,” a journalistic exploration of American history.
While prepping for that show a debilitating health issue surfaced and confined me to a chair for prolonged periods of time. This is when I discovered public domain comic books online. Taken with the artform and shocked by its mid-century content, I harvested an inventory of curated assets in the tens of thousands. I took these violent, sexist (and often just sexy), panels out of their original context and put them into reimagined scenarios, tinged with abusive, queer or risqué elements, applying them to wood panels by photo transfer, to produce my current series, “Pulp Fission: Classic Comics Reconstructed.”
For more information about the artist, please visit her website.