JULM Studios (artists Leslie Mutchler & Jason Urban) speak about their exhibition, Impracticum: Mining Books on Color, and accompanying website, colorimpracticum.space, with designer, publisher, and educator Emily Larned.
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About JULM Studios
Jason Urban and Leslie Mutchler aka JULM Studios have been working collaboratively since 2012 and are based in Brooklyn, New York. Through an interdisciplinary, research-intensive practice, they explore facts and fictions of pedagogy. With a shared background in traditional and digital printmaking, they employ a kind of pseudo-bibliology through the utilization of books, printing, and publishing. Photographs, video, and sculptural objects serve as facsimiles for research, experience, and exploration. Their projects investigate the evolving meaning of printed matter and the “sacred spaces” print occupies in the context of analog and digital technologies. Read More
About Emily Larned
Emily Larned (b.1977, she/her/hers) has been publishing as a socially engaged art practice since 1993, when as a teenager she made her first zine. She is co-founder of Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts (ILSSA, est. 2008), a union for reflective creative practice, which explores the immaterial working conditions of impractical laborers through participatory projects, publications, and exhibitions. Through her imprint Alder & Frankia (est. 2016), she publishes new collaborations and reissues of feminist archival material. Read More
About the Exhibition
JULM Studios‘ Impracticum: Mining Books on Color is an exhibition with an interactive website (colorimpracticum.space) that investigates color in the physical and digital realms through scientific, aesthetic, conceptual, and spiritual methodologies.
The exhibition and website are rooted in a fictive academic course, Geochromatic Studies, which offers a series of interwoven prompts exploring both rational and irrational applications of color in the context of historical precedence and speculative interpretation. Special emphasis is placed on geological matter as it pertains to the physical origins of color.
Rather than a “practicum,” which is a course emphasizing the practical application of a field of study, Geochromatic Studies is an “impracticum” – untethered by usefulness and applicability. Instead, it serves as a laboratory and a playground allowing for uninhibited exploration of color.
The fictive course also aims to reflect the benefits and drawbacks of online education that many artist educators have felt over the past year and a half of the Covid 19 pandemic: while delivering coursework virtually can be an exciting way to share content and create a multi-media classroom, it also creates greater distance and less connection between faculty and students.