Julie Blackmon | Biography


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Julie Blackmon lives and works in Springfield, Missouri. The artistʼs work is included in
numerous museums and public collections including that of the George Eastman House;
Nelson Atkins Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Kemper Museum of
Contemporary Art, Kansas City; the Portland Art Museum; and the Musée Français de la
Photographie in Bièvres, France. She was named American Photo's "Emerging
Photographer of 2008" and one of PDN's "30 New and Emerging Photographers" in
2007, and has been the recipient of various awards including first prize from The Santa
Fe Center for Photography in the Project Competition in 2006. Blackmon has published
two monographs, her first of which sold out, Domestic Vacations (Radius Press, 2008)
and Homegrown (Radius Press co-published with Robert Mann Gallery, 2014).

Artist Statement

The Dutch proverb “a Jan Steen household” originated in the 17th century and is used today
to refer to a home in disarray, full of rowdy children and boisterous family gatherings. The
paintings of Steen, along with those of other Dutch and Flemish genre painters, helped inspire
this body of work. I am the oldest of nine children and now the mother of three. As Steen’s
personal narratives of family life depicted nearly 400 yrs. ago, the conflation of art and life is an
area I have explored in photographing the everyday life of my family and the lives of my sisters
and their families at home. These images are both fictional and auto-biographical, and reflect
not only our lives today and as children growing up in a large family, but also move beyond the
documentary to explore the fantastic elements of our everyday lives, both imagined and real.
The stress, the chaos, and the need to simultaneously escape and connect are issue that I
investigate in this body of work. We live in a culture where we are both “child centered” and
“self-obsessed.” The struggle between living in the moment versus escaping to another reality
is intense since these two opposites strive to dominate. Caught in the swirl of soccer practices,
play dates, work, and trying to find our way in our “make-over” culture, we must still create the
space to find ourselves. The expectations of family life have never been more at odds with
each other. These issues, as well as the relationship between the domestic landscape of the
past and present, are issues I have explored in these photographs. I believe there are moments
that can be found throughout any given day that bring sanctuary. It is in finding these moments
amidst the stress of the everyday that my life as a mother parallels my work as an artist, and
where the dynamics of family life throughout time seem remarkably unchanged. As an artist
and as a mother, I believe life’s most poignant moments come from the ability to fuse fantasy
and reality: to see the mythic amidst the chaos.