WG: How do you select the images that you paint - what criteria do you use?

JM: When I’m watching movies or observing my surroundings I pay attention to occurrences that can generate uncanny feelings, primarily reflections, shadows, and silhouettes. As my work currently revolves around domestic spaces, I also look for architectural features that hold symbolic meanings that swing from privacy to exposure – doorways, bedrooms, keys, sheer curtains. In film, I pay particular attention to double exposures, superimpositions, slow fades, split diopter shots – visual signals of doubling that when paused can itself become a fantastic space.

Paint allows me to complicate the direction of time and permanence of place, casting a shadow of doubt upon the viewer. Layered imagery mimics film dissolves, adding to the tension of uncertainty – the viewer does not and cannot know what is coming next or what came before. I use eyes and hands as motifs to add to this tension – eyes look off “screen” and hands gesture past the viewer, toward something, or someone, else in the space – giving the sense that an unseen presence may be lurking beyond them. The process of painting and inclusion of certain motifs has the power to give body and cerebral presence to an otherwise lifeless object. I am interested in creating work that is personal for me, but I don’t want to divulge very many autobiographical details to the public. I think the tension I feel as an artist between revelation and concealment (or, in the uncanny sense, heimlich and unheimlich) creates a palpable atmosphere on canvas.

- Julia Maiuri, 2022

WG: All of your recent works are small in scale. What is the significance of the size in relation to the content of your work and your practice?

JM: I have been thinking about fantastic spaces – the writer Rosemary Jackson refers to enclosures as necessary for modern fantasy tales; a space, she emphasizes, where “maximum transformation and terror“ can occur. While her text refers to the Gothic enclosures of Poe and Stoker, I refer to the enclosure of the canvas stretcher. Striking a cord between intimacy and confinement is foundational and, as a result, the canvases rarely extend beyond the limits of an eight by ten-inch surface. At this size, the human head can fit just within the borders of the stretcher frame, directly relating the picture plane to the body (and mind), implicating the viewer within the scene. I give the viewer just enough information so they may get a glimpse of this other world, but leave the portal (frustratingly) too small to step through. At such a small scale, I find that what you don’t see becomes just as important as what you do.