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.
Experience the Color Impracticum website→
About JULM Studios:
Based in Brooklyn, New York, JULM Studios is the collaborative practice of artists Jason Urban and Leslie Mutchler who have been working together since 2012. Currently, through their 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.
The pair has had solo exhibitions at Monaco (St. Louis, MO), the Delaware Contemporary (Wilmington, DE), NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia, PA), The Print Center (Philadelphia, PA), Centre for Fine Print Research (Bristol, UK), Space Gallery (Portland, ME), Atelier Circulaire (Montreal, Canada), among others. They have been awarded numerous residencies including Edition/Basel in Basel, Switzerland, Cork Printmakers International Visiting Artist Residency in Cork, Ireland and currently in residence at Dieu Donne in Brooklyn. Both are affiliated with Pratt Institute where Mutchler is Chair of the Foundation Program and Urban teaches publishing courses in the Communication Design program.
Website: julmstudios.com
IG: @julmstudios