Julie Gemuend

[En anglais]

Traversing two landscapes, Julie Gemuend’s performance-based video Imprint (2014) merges the corporeal and the topographical. The video diptych offers a series of meditative images of the Sonoran Desert, a vast terrain covering 280,000 square kilometres that include Arizona, California, and Sonora, Mexico. Employing the figure as a speculative tool, Gemuend unpacks concepts of ‘self’ and ‘place’ by allowing the desert to imprint onto her nude body. Closely framed by the camera, she exposes her faintly reddened midriff or a single knee speckled with small indents. These close-ups are paired with images of the instigators of these markings — rocks, twigs, shrubbery. In other frames the self/other relationship seems to be more harmonious. In one such moment, the artist simply reaches her outstretched hand into a dried, dense bush, while in another she positions herself beside a towering cactus, allowing it to visually bisect her body.

Throughout the video there appears a restrained symmetry that poetically links the two images; a spider-web strung between a tree’s tendrils is coupled with a mass of blond hair draped over a single branch. One of the more compelling of these pairings reveals the tops of cacti, up against a mostly clear sky. The one disruption in this blue canvas is a wisp of cloud, set in slow motion by a faint wind. On the opposite screen the artist analogously stands in a forest of cacti, her back to the camera. The wind is active here too, blowing her hair, sweeping it across her body. Folded into this synchronous space, flora and fauna are seceded from pure biology and schematized instead as seductive patterns — as shifting geometrics.