Julie Wills

Dry Bed features the performer in a dry lake bed, restlessly lying before a single-sized headboard as if waiting, in bed, alone. Her actions, alternating between listlessness, longing and reticence, present the shortcomings of female sexuality as a traditional means of livelihood or survival, while the expansive landscape and inadequately-sized headboard point to a nuanced complicity in accepting or remaining within this role.

Marie Antoinette in America is an ongoing series of performance, video and photographic works set within or referencing the open landscape. Based loosely on a variety of 18th century schemes to build a home-in-exile in the U.S. for the fleeing French royal family, this series imagines that Marie Antoinette has escaped the French Revolution and settled in the American west. I perform the character wearing a tumbleweed wig, as if she has been alone and wandering for so long that tumbleweed has lodged itself in her hair, or as if she herself has blown in on the wind. Each work in this series portrays the character’s attempts at livelihood or survival and explores the roles available to her based on gender, class, and skill set. The landscape is used as a metaphor for a psychological ‘wilderness;’ it implies isolation and makes her societally-based efforts at survival all the more inept.

While this premise begins with a historical reference, it does not investigate the particulars of the real Marie Antoinette’s history in much detail. I am interested in her emblematic role in the popular imagination as a representation of opulence and excess and as an ultimately tragic figure, but the character in this work quickly becomes a foil for the exploration of my own motivations and desires. Externally, the character of Marie Antoinette allows me to investigate class, privilege, sexuality and power while internally this character allows me to examine my own conflicts in these arenas. The auto-voyeuristic component in this work, seen in the inclusion of mirrors or even simple self-conscious gestures and expression, acknowledges this internal query. This project allows me to explore a variety of scenarios related to labor and leisure, culture and solitude, penance and self-discipline.

Spring depicts the Marie Antoinette character repeatedly initiating, but failing to execute, a dive into a rural livestock watering spring box. This work acknowledges sport as a traditional means of defying gender expectations, though the action itself remains impotent. It further acknowledges the absurdity of human expectations for the landscape.

The Hunt featured Marie Antoinette in a choreographed sequence of movements with the denuded ribcage from a bull elk. Performance movement was slow, rhythmic and dance-like, as the character ambiguously struggled to entice, possess and consume the carcass.

Language Lessons featured the seated character of Marie Antoinette, surrounded by landscape elements and an oversized portrait frame, attempting to repeat the French phrases from an instructional audio recording intended to teach English to native French speakers. This work referenced the conventions of portraiture, landscape painting, artistic display and artistic education as well as the Francophilia of the academic tradition.

Interstate features the Marie Antoinette character endlessly dancing to the same song next to a rural highway, presumably for the pleasure of passing trucks. Objecting to political, social and material excesses, Marie Antoinette’s detractors attacked her with sexual charges: calling her a whore, fabricating lewd anecdotes and creating caricatures of her sexualized body. In this way, sexuality offered a conflated punishment for her true infractions. In the Marie Antoinette in America series, sexuality similarly offers a simultaneous crime and its punishment.

Cherokee Rose was performed and filmed on land occupied by the Cherokee Nation prior to ‘removal’ by the U.S. government in the 1830s. This landscape currently features a neglected tree nursery, its irregular formality like a Versailles gone awry. The performers, as interlopers in this landscape, occupy the land in a senseless leisure.

Portrait depicts the Marie Antoinette character in the impotent role of a framed portrait figure seated in the open landscape, though her body visible beyond the frame gives indication of her growing discomfort.