JULIA MAIURI

Mindscreen
August 27 - October 1, 2022
Gallery 12.26
150 Manufacturing St. #205
Dallas, Texas 75207
Installation images by Todora Photography

Drawing from an archive of film stills and horror movie tropes, Maiuri’s small scale paintings explore liminal spaces, the uncanny, and sometimes unnerving occurrences in the everyday. The title, Mindscreen, refers to a film technique in which a scene shows the dreams, thoughts, or internal dialogue of a specific character. A mindscreen is typically marked with stylistic devices such as dissolves, fades, superimpositions, selected color schemes, and desaturated hues. These techniques inform Maiuri’s compositional process, where gradual shifts in hue and tone give the illusion of transparent, overlapping layers. Yet, they are reimagined through the artist’s lens – her personal history, her experiences, and even interiors that are intimately familiar to her.

The paintings’ scale possesses a voyeuristic quality – they invite the viewer to engage at proximity; they tempt one to linger in the softly hued spaces – areas of intimacy and transition. Maiuri frequently transports the viewer to a bedroom – a space that carries a sense of privacy and vulnerability, and at times possesses an air of eerie familiarity; each painting encourages the viewer to stay – to extend the duration of uncertainty; to bask in the tension. This tension creates an undeniable presence, which is at once unsettling and subtly seductive. She deftly captures those moments just before a grand reveal, or a startling climax. We enter into a feeling of heightened awareness that borders on deja-vu. And yet, despite this feeling of familiarity, the viewer steps into  uncharted territory that carves out a new imagined space.