Mental Fitness

ARTIST STATEMENT

In recent paintings, I often use text phrases that function as titles to begin a composition.
These refer to both the natural environment and the human psyche. One painting, “Suppression
Tactics” was conceived of as I considered the wildfire conditions in west alongside the
systemic ways that information is kept from the people who need it most. In the painting “Disturbed
Sites,” I’m borrowing the pink filter of fire retardant, dropped from planes, and left on
the post-fire landscape to refer to the way that these disturbances can be both uncanny and
generative. The text matrix as the first layer is meant as a place holder for thought as well as
a visual structure to organize the painting itself. By layering and weaving the text in and out
through features of the natural landscape, the painting might become a site to contemplate
this alchemy. In still other paintings, I imagine the landscape communicating directly through
leaving its own organic mark versus translating it into text myself. In works such as “Bank
Breach” and “Weed Impunity” I am painting on top of fabric that has been bundled dyed in advance
with local plants, literally embedding the plants themselves into the cotton. I imagine
the finished painting as a kind of collaborative gesture with the landscape.

SHORT BIO

Julia Schwadron Marianelli is a painter and faculty of the Fine Arts Department, at Lake Tahoe Community College. Her paintings have been written about in multiple publications including The Brooklyn Rail, The Bangkok Post, and Contemporaryartdaily.com. She has shown her artwork across the country as well as internationally. She was a Visiting Professor of Painting and Artist in Residence at Chiang Mai University from 2010 - 2011, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Iowa from 2007-2009. She was a founding member of the “Matzo Files,” an artist flat file project inside Streit’s Matzo store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2004.

Schwadron Marianelli received a Joan Mitchell fellowship in 2006. She completed her BA in Studio art at UC San Diego in 1998 and her MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art in 2004.

She currently lives and works in South Lake Tahoe with her husband and two kids.