Julia Meyerowitz-Katz

My drawings and paintings represent the shared unconscious dreaming and corresponding transformations in energy, emotion, and thought that are a profound and essential part of bearing witness. ‘Bearing witness’ is an ordinary and ongoing human process. We all do it. We bear witness to our own lives; we bear witness to the lives of others; we need others to bear witness to our lives. Currently we are all bearing witness to a complex, multi-faceted and shifting global crisis. My expressionist painting begins as a spontaneous gesture. I manipulate materials with my hands directly on paper or canvas, giving visual form to how my body remembers experiences that my conscious mind can’t access. The act of making becomes a re-membering and re-cycling of emotional and psychological experience through the transformation of energy. As the work progresses, perspectives change and unexpected new layers of meaning emerge. That which is internal and invisible becomes visible and known. There is tension between what lies underneath, barely visible and only hinted at, and what moves clearly visible across and through the upper layers. Through the process of becoming, while difficult and troubling topics have to be navigated, joy and optimism can emerge.