Sometimes it’s hard to see what’s around you—to grasp what the little details of a place really mean as you take that same walk to work, or understand how much some part of you really loves the decrepit factories on the skyline. This is why artists like Julie Elkins appear: to help people embrace, and in doing so transcend, the everyday. Her miniaturized versions of city streets and dwellings resonate with mystery, the passage of time and the imprints left from it; they’re fastidiously detailed, some with realistic touches like graffiti and gaping drains, some with a more supernatural, Beetlejuice-like feel. Each piece looks like a chunk taken out of its context, the layers of dirt, pipes, architectural foundations all visible, brick walls ragged and crumbling along the edges. And she does it all in porcelain! The process is intense: the forms are hollow, so she sizes up the shape of what she wants to make from one of her photos or drawings, cuts out thin slabs of porcelain, layers them together (kind of like sewing), and adds all the 3D details. Then she adds mason stain and does a basic color firing, and finally, paints in all the details with the stain. After the second firing, it’s done. VCU’s ceramics classes wooed her from her original path in metalworking, especially when ventured into different clays. “Working with porcelain like making things with cream cheese—it’s really fine, you can get really detailed, and you get really bright colors,” Julie notes.

Her aesthetic’s a bit dark, magical, and ghostly, and she got that last bit honest, thanks to our fair city. Having moved to Richmond in 1999, she found herself navigating the realm of creaky old haunted houses and nighttime alley walks, noticing that the buildings in particular seem to have their own sets of closely-connected spirits. “I’m not going to paint ghosts, but I like to show how time has passed—trees overtaking sidewalks and breaking them, places that are crumbling, signs that people have been present in those places. When I first arrived in Richmond, I had a lot of time to walk around and see it all… the cracks in the sidewalk, how the bricks are laid. And my dad’s a carpenter, so watching him build things has influenced me a lot, too.” Her current spot, an art ranch called Dudetown on the outskirts of Ashland, doesn’t afford her much urban landscape to admire, but it has its own vibrant brand of organic magic. Chickens, guineas, dogs, cats, and a pig named Cupcake roam free outside her studio window, and theatrical events occasionally take place on the forest-lined lawn, thanks to her involvement with theater groups Punk Sinatra (with her fiance, poet Mike Dulin) and All the Saints Theater Company. “That stuff keeps me well-rounded; I really like making things from found materials, doing performance, making art for its own sake.”

You can find Julie’s work in town at her Plant Zero space, Gallery 3 (always open for fourth Friday there!), and at the Schindler Gallery—she’ll be showing solo there in September 2009. Other upcoming shows in town include a Plant Zero showcase at Artspace; she’ll also be tripping up to Pittsburgh for a show at the Morgan Contemporary Glass Gallery and SOFA (Sculptural Objects and Functional Art) Chicago. And check out her website, http://www.gaptoothstudios.com, for pic, commission questions, and contact info.

WEB | http://www.gaptoothstudios.com

julie you are the realest kind of artist.  and an inspiration to your peers.

JULIE IS AMAZIN’!!