"For You, No Wound.)" Opening Reception

When:
Friday, Mar 07, 2025 6:00p -
8:00p

Where:
Piano Craft Gallery
793 Tremont Street
Boston, MA 02118

EventScheduled OfflineEventAttendanceMode

Admission:
FREE

Hosted by:
...
piano_craft_gallery Piano Craft Gallery, Inc.

Categories:
Art, Good for Groups, Rainy Day Ideas, Shows

Event website:
https://pianocraftgallery.com/piano-craft-gallery-2022-23/2024-annual-review-lcwaz

Piano Craft Gallery invites everyone to the opening reception of Julia McGehean's exhibition, "For You, No Wound.)". The opening reception is free to attend and there will be light refreshments.

Julia McGehean’s first solo exhibition, “for you, no wound.)”, explores the subjective stakes of the mundane that led literary theorist Roland Barthes to untangle the universal mechanics of the archive. In his seminal novel, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Barthes defines punctum as the profound details that pierce through an individual observer, while others remain unharmed by the significance. Throughout the gallery, McGehean installs a series of paper paintings and floral arrangements based on the description of the photograph where Barthes first encountered this unilateral phenomenon.

In response to Barthes’ rhetorical maneuver to withhold the portrait of his late mother from publication, McGehean’s work considers how language is an imperfect proxy for communication. Though Barthes alludes the picture is set in a solarium, McGehean takes the title literally—reverse-engineering Winter Garden Photograph into a surreal environment where flowers bloom and instantly freeze in sub-zero temperatures. This misinterpretation results in a paracosmic landscape where private and public mourning intertwine.

Over time, McGehean has developed an abstract alphabet by synthesizing various brands of brick-building roses into a unified system she combines with school supplies and other communication based objects. In contrast to the fluidity of oil paint, this modular approach transforms language into flexible forms with intuitive manual grammar. This incremental process allows the artist's body to serve as a reference point within a standard set, anchoring each composition around her five-foot frame. In Death of the Future, a 12 x 48 inch oil painting of a cloudy sky, McGehean locates herself within the constrained proportions of continuous computer paper—beginning with an affixed pencil sharpener at the knee and embedding key anatomical landmarks up the floral stem, from her pubic bone to her ribcage and mouth.

Just as Barthes’ Winter Garden Photograph remains unseen, its absence shapes the emotional weight of Camera Lucida. McGehean’s fragmented figures are simultaneously there and not there, evoking a similar sense of loss as they hover between construction and collapse. These spectral forms accumulate, transforming the gallery into a cemetery within the Uncanny Valley, where memory falters and language takes on a silent physicality. Like Barthes’ ghost image, they do not reveal; instead, they haunt, lingering as eerie elegies to the inarticulable.


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03/07/2025 18:00:00 03/07/2025 20:00:00 America/New_York "For You, No Wound.)" Opening Reception <p>Piano Craft Gallery invites everyone to the opening reception of Julia McGehean's exhibition, "For You, No Wound.)". The opening reception is free to attend and there will be light refreshments....

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