by David Bernabo
Julia Betts is a Pittsburgh-based artist and educator, often working in sculpture, performance, and installation. I visited her Radiant Hall studio to talk about her recent exhibition The Dams are Broken at McDonough Museum of Art and also a video piece called The Floor is a Door, which you can watch below.
***
David Bernabo: How did you make the works in The Dams are Broken at McDonough Museum of Art—conceptually, but also just, like, how do you make these things? [laughs]
Julia Betts: When it starts off, there’s usually a person that I have picked out. I think of them as a character. In that character, I have an imagining of how they’re going to relate to this process. I have a pose that I’m thinking for this particular person based on how I think they’re gonna feel when this is happening to them. And so I go to that person’s house, and then I walk around their house and I just photograph objects, any objects that they’re willing for me to photograph. [With some objects], they’re like, No, and I’m like, Okay. [laughs]
So, I photograph objects around their home with my phone. I take those photos home, and then I paint an outline with rubber. It’s just a rubber paste, a blackboard paste. Then I paint the inside with acrylic paint [on plastic wrap]. I do three layers of that. Each layer has to dry, which builds up the strength of it. Then I peel those all off, and I lay that down on more plastic wrap with all the objects and the painting of the person. I start, like, spilling them into each other, which means I take cups of watery paint and I spill them all into each other. That dries, and then I peel that up. I have to mount that on some kind of backer. It’s usually plywood or cardboard or wire or something that’s like rubber.
DB: How do you find the people who model for these works? These are real people?
JB: These are real people. I’ve done a lot of my friends; that’s how I started off. Then I started posting about it on Instagram. Does anyone want to volunteer? And so I got some volunteers. Some of the people I worked with online sent me images of objects in their room. I would make them like a list of things I was looking for. I’ve also met people at residencies—Will you be one of my models?
DB: Is it important that these are real people with real objects?
JB: I’m interested that these are portraits of people in their homes. And it’s not just like a portrait of a person; it’s a portrait of them with their belongings.
DB: Then the things or events that happen to them, does that originate from them, or is that a narrative that you put them in?
JB: It’s a narrative that I put them in. When I know the person, I do think, How would they respond to this? Because I’m thinking about the boundaries of the body breaking and how that can be a negative or a positive. It’s vulnerable when your boundaries are broken, and vulnerability can be this scary thing or this positive thing.
DB: Compositionally, when you’re creating the characters, are you sketching things out? Do you have an idea of how it’s going to go, or is it kind of improvised?
JB: I did have some sketches. I drew out some ideas of figures and how they would look. But then once I got into the person’s house and I saw their particular belongings, it shifts. So, I ended up responding to what they had. I put the compositions together thinking a lot about the colors, and I try to make the colors contrast whatever’s around it so that they’re very vibrant. I don’t want anything to get lost. I try to fully surround the figure, so they’re kind of overwhelmed by the belongings.
DB: I love the liquidity of everything. It feels like things are frozen the midst of a stop motion animation.
JB: I’ve been working with liquidity since I was in grad school. Thinking about liquids as this uncontrollable material, I think a lot about the instability of life and how everything is actually very chaotic for as much as we try to control things. Thinking about the bodily fluids—how we’re contained within this shell, but everything within us is mostly water and how we are mostly water.
The title is The Dams Are Broken, and so I’m thinking about everyone dissolving into the ocean. Basically, everyone just breaks down eventually and falls apart. Everyone connects to each other and the idea of boundaries between people, between things, is actually in some ways an illusion. But in other ways—like, emotionally—you may feel like very isolated. But in other ways, it’s not real.
Studio photographs by David Bernabo
DB: Some of the feelings I get from looking at the work are pictures of horror amidst a series of pedestrian items, but also this cartoony, nostalgic feeling. Like, The Floor is a Door—your video piece that depicts interior home spaces with the corresponding underground spaces below—gives me the mildest Fraggle Rock vibes. [laughs]
JB: I was watching my niece color in a coloring book. A lot of the childhood part of it comes from connecting to her and remembering my feelings of childhood, cartoonishness, and in some ways, wanting to become a cartoon. I like the simplicity of a cartoon. If life could be more simple, if things were more clearly defined—that’s very attractive to me in some ways, but in other ways it’s maddening to me. I don’t want things to be clearly defined or boxed in.
DB: It feels like these video pieces have a very fixed boundary the way you’re filmed them. They’re very tight, a little claustrophobic.
JB: Yeah, with the piece at the McDonough, I was thinking about this collapse of boundaries. But with The Floor is a Door, it’s very confined. This division between this reality of this room versus this underground, this imagined reality that is on top of each other. There is a sharp delineation between this imaginary place and this real place, because this is a real representation of a room that I used to live in.
DB: How about the underground part?
JB: That is this imaginary, like, I don’t know what the underground of my room looks like. [laughs] But I’m going through each section of my room and building these sets to recreate parts of my room. Then I’m going to put all the videos together eventually to make a video installation.
DB: With this work and your past works, there’s a prominent role for the body in the work.
JB: I do work a lot with the body. I think a lot about skin and that’s where it started with thinking about the boundaries of the body, how the skin is this connection point to the body, but it’s also this barrier between other people. So with my body, I’m building and breaking down these barriers.
I think a lot about if the object can hold the performance [without having a literal performance]. If you can read the process through the piece, then it would just be the piece. [Otherwise], if you need to see the performance, I show the performance.
DB: How do you know whether someone needs to see the performance?
JB: Well, I look at the object and I try to see if you can read the performance through it, like, if you have the ability to imagine what actually happened through looking at that object. And a lot of times it’s, No. [laughs] So, sometimes I put up the performance.
DB: What’s your studio practice look like?
JB: I usually get an hour a day to work on my art, because I have other jobs and things that I have to do. Sometimes, I’ll get longer periods, if there’s no teaching or if it’s a spring break or winter break. I usually have a couple projects going at once. I’ve really gotten into these long-term projects—ever since I got out of school—that go on for years and years and years. I like to work on things for longer periods of time. I’m hoping to start new projects, but everything in my work takes a lot of time. It’s very labor intensive.
DB: It’s nice that your work can be iterative, that you can keep showing the works in different configurations.
JB: I’m gonna try to start showing these sets as a piece. I have a show coming up [in 2026, to be announced at a later date] where we’re going to build a set in the space and set up the objects as the show, along with the video.
DB: I’d imagine these pieces are hard to sell. Does commerce factor into your practice at all?
JB: It is difficult. I have sold some of these little objects individually, maybe, 15 of the objects individually. Someone bought the plant before. I’ve had someone buy the hair brush, the scissors. I always make them over and over again, because there’s three of every object. So people commission me, and I just make them an extra one, so it doesn’t affect my installation. But, I don’t really think about it. It’s definitely not a motivating force at all. I just want to make what I want to make and figure out some other way to make money. Yeah, I don’t want to be boxed in like that.
David Bernabo is an oral historian, musician, artist, and independent filmmaker. His film work has documented western Pennsylvania food systems, climate change, the studio practices of composers and artists, and the histories of iconic arts institutions like the Mattress Factory. He is most noted for Moundsville, a documentary co-directed with former Wall Street Journal writer John W. Miller, which screened on PBS for three years.
IG: @davidbernabo
Website: davidbernabo.info
Want to continue engaging deeply with one artist’s portfolio? This month’s articles are published with support from The Frick Pittsburgh for Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). As Zach Hunley wrote in Petrichor: “When viewing the work of Kara Walker, you are bearing witness to history and time compounded.” Revisit the past and rethink the present now at the Frick Art Museum.
PETRICHOR 
Leave a comment