"One piece from Julie Nelson catches my eye almost instantly. The work is small, personal and intricate. Years ago, a friend who worked as an installer for the Carnegie International told me the installation crew (all somewhat frustrated artists themselves) codified the unwritten rules for getting your work admitted into a major exhibition:
1) Make your work big.
2) If you can't make it big, make it red.
3) If you can't make it red, include a nude.
Her work does none of this. When I first saw Julie's work a year ago, I barely even took note until a friend encouraged me to have a second look. Something about the intricate bends in her abstract figures drew me in, like it was the articulation of a complicated experience. I get the sense her work will continue to change for me over time.
I make the second bid on her piece, hoping that art patrons this year are overlooking her work as I previously did. They can appreciate her work more fully some other time, just as long as it's after the clock runs out on the auction. But there's a problem this year that I am not too happy about: the ribbon the jury posted next to her piece. People are definitely going to notice her work now. "
~ George Nixon
(excerpted from "Get Started: A Good Night Out," SF Open Studios: TheGuide, 2007, pp. 20-21, 134.
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"Venturing into the mammoth warehouse held by CELLspace can be a tad scary. Lucky for you, Crucible Steel, the collective's gallery, is located right inside the front door...the gallery has been the site of some of the most innovative displays by emerging Bay Area artists...Oddly, given the current propensity away from the medium, the strongest (and most abundant) pieces are abstract paintings by artists like Leslie Moon and Julie Nelson."
~ Marie-Adele Moniot
(excerpted from "Salon at Crucible Steel Gallery," sfgate.com, January 2002)
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"Julie Nelson, an artist-in-residence since 2004, loves to help children develop their critical thinking skills. 'I like to help them articulate what they're experiencing,' she says. 'I choose a painting and say, 'Who hates this? If you hate it, why do you hate it?' Kids' responses are so gut-level, spontaneous and enthusiastic. There isn't that adult, intellectual overlay that can get in the way of visceral appreciation of art.'
From the artist's perspective, there are lots of reasons to get involved with ArtSpan's youth program. In her previous job as an arts administrator, Nelson enjoyed leading tours for young children in the art gallery at the University of Maryland, College Park. The open studio tours she gives now are a good way to break up the 'very solitary process' of being a painter, she says."
~ Julia Scott
(excerpted from "Art for City Youth Celebrates Five Years," SF Open Studios: TheGuide, 2005, pp. 17+ 49)
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"The eight artists in this show are, according to curator Julie Nelson, concerned with archetypes, the 'eternal forms fundamental to the structure of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.' These paintings and sculptures of trees, plant forms, and seed pods reflect nature transformed by the imagination. Nelson's perspective, in fact, is a contemporary version of the Romantic notion... instead of a scientific-positivist approach documenting natural processes, this work is the distillation of the artist's responses to 'cosmic blueprints,' which for Nelson include 'opposition, coalescence, multiplicity, reproduction, growth and flow.'
What makes the show work is not that any of these artists actually claim to have found something eternal or fixed. The work, instead, reflects a fascination with inquiry, with delving into complexity and then leaving it all in an abstract state-- because in the shadowy area between the recognizable and the remote, some surprising, unidentified thing communicates to us. A neo-romantic would say that the big nature 'out there' resonates with the little nature within our hearts. A skeptic would say that art is a language, and like any other language, can be learned without referring to transcendental sources. The best of the artists in this show seem to stand somewhere in the middle...
[Julie Nelson's] attention to the transformation of nature via the artist's imagination is insightful, providing a continuation to this consistently engaging show that is always something to look forward to each fall."
~ George Howell
(excerpted from "Crosscurrents '97: Structural Archetypes," Art Papers, January-February 1998, p. 52
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"Although abstract art often seems far removed from everyday reality, some abstract artists are emulating patterns and rhythms they find in nature. It may not be easy to pin an exact label on the resulting abstractions these artists produce, but you can at least get a feeling for the underlying structures in both organic and inorganic forms.
That's the curatorial premise behind Structural Archetypes, an eight-artist exhibit at the Art Gallery at the University of Maryland, College Park. Curated by artist and art administrator Julie Nelson, the show is this year's edition of an annual 'Crosscurrents' exhibit that features regional artists and curators who will be familiar to devout gallery-goers in the area."
~ MIke Giuliano
(excerpted from "Nature in the Abstract: University of Maryland Art Exhibit Suggests Rather Than Imitates," The Baltimore Sun, September 29, 1997, p. 1D
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