Julie Monté

Julia Monté is an artist passionate about making sculpture, writing about art, talking about art, and making big. She received her BFA in painting and creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute in 2018. She helped run an arts publication in Kansas City, called Informality Blog; the publication will has since relocated to Seattle. It was her participation and connections made in the New York Studio Residency Program that brought her to Seattle. Before relocating in 2022, she wrote material for exhibitions curated by local artist Anthony White: Ultra Light Beams at MountAnalog and In Crystallized Time at Museum of Museums. While in Kansas City, MO she ran a local arts publication called Informality Blog, writing about emerging artists and local art spaces. She is relaunching this publication in September of 2024 online with its new home base as Seattle. Her work has been shown in local businesses in Capitol Hill and in the historic Colosseum building at 500 pike for XO’s Summer Art Party in the Summer or 2023. As a member of Equinox Studios in Georgetown, you can find her in her studio in Container Village every second Saturday for Open Studios during the Georgetown Art Walk.

Communal experiences are defined as people doing something together. Specific examples outlined in an online search include riding a train, amongst other more intimate scenarios. It is the stuff of metroplexes that arouses such opportunities and fascinates the motives of my work. I have always been a passenger in some way, observant of my surroundings and my thoughts while in transit. The interior of a vehicle I associate with an incubation space to prepare for the destination in which one is heading. Infinite destinations line up for a brief moment through common routes, views, and, I imagine, emotions; sonder activates in settings like such. I find intrigue in the scaffolding that holds up and upends our lives. Transit systems, stadiums, and rollercoasters all butt up against each other and direct grand communal experiences. Using primarily found objects discarded on the sides of roads and other recycled materials, Julia creates stilted scenes and intricate works about unfolding systems and destined passengers. As I make my pattern-filled depiction of sprawling apparatuses I think of communal experiences from all vantage points.