Juliana Paciulli

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

My work combines disparate pieces of American cultural ephemera into assemblages that explore language, memory and desire. I start with archival research and then move through a process that incorporates appropriated images and text with analog photographic approaches and drawing to re-examine dominant cultural narratives surrounding femininity. My most recent project is a group of cyanotypes and colleges that focus on popular culture from the late part of the 20th century, specifically the confusing, patriarchal messages that served as the blue-prints of my suburban, adolescent understandings around gender. In each of these artifacts there is a tension between a purported narrative and the power structure that created it, as well as nods to social and political forces that laid the groundwork for our current cultural moment. I reconfigure these movie stills, editorials and ads into surrealist landscapes and assemblages where textual and photographic elements intersect with interpretative adornments and flourishes, like those sometimes seen in illuminated manuscripts. My interventions recontextualize these appropriated images to overturn their original assumptions and shift the gaze they were intending to invite, back outward towards the culture itself.

Artwork