Nashville-based interdisciplinary artist, Juliana Morgan Alvarez, is opening their first solo show at The Forge Gallery with opening reception May 15th, 6 - 9 PM. An expansion of work previously seen at Elephant Gallery earlier this year, Juliana’s standing ceramic sculptures feature hand-carved surfaces and iridescent interiors colored by smoke and scorch marks. Each hand-built work is reminiscent of land formations as well as bodies whose soft undulations are paused by the static nature of the materials. They encourage you, with care, to experience the flexing and resting curves with all of your senses including touch. Above and amongst the standing works are Juliana’s hanging sculptures composed of hundreds of shard-like, polygonal tiles shaped in the palm of their hand. Viewed from a distance their contracting and expanding groupings bring to mind a murmuration of dark starlings in flight.

“Collapse” as its name suggests is an abstract imagining of a supernova surrounding a black hole at the center of the installation. Juliana’s fascination with natural phenomena, particularly ones paradoxically combining destructive and creative forces, is evident in the stellar explosion consisting of roughly 750 tiles suspended from a hand-knotted string grid. “Molting Nautilus” stands at 28 inches tall and is covered in advancing lateral marks resembling a nautilus shell cracked open. “Lorelei” is a smaller creature at just a foot tall and little more than 7 inches across at its widest point. With its’ unusual miniscule bubbles that foam out from the 3 inch wide opening on its side it is named for the sea nymph and the large rock that sits on the Rhine River, known for its distinctive echoing. A similar reverberation can be heard by tapping or running your fingertips along its ridges.

The coloration on every work in the exhibit is left behind by live-flames during an imposed ritual passage through fire. Violently pushing the pieces toward evolution. Erosion and breakage that may have occurred in time, is forced upon them a short distance from their creation. Those with PTSD, it is said, relive the moment of traumatization repeatedly as if always for the first time. The repeated difficulty of releasing each piece to the volatile nature of pit-firing becomes a representation of this cycle. Awaiting the mostly inevitable high-pitched ping that rings out from the fire signifying a fissure eruption somewhere along its form. Caring for the bodies after the embers have cooled becomes a process of healing and fortification. 

For three decades Juliana’s emphasis was on performance. Ballet, then theatre, then film, and back to theatre when she earned her MFA in acting and performance from California Institute of the Arts in 2020. Graduating with a live-performance degree into a quarantined life that made live-performance impossible forced Juliana to experiment with other forms of expression. With this difficulty came the opportunity for the first time to be the creator of their own vision. The ability to distill complex themes into tactile expressions has been an exciting discovery that was supported and bolstered by their year-long fellowship with Buchanan Arts. Sculpture has also allowed for the first time the possibility of work that can exist in space without the necessity of their physical being. If anyone has ever known the distinctly difficult pursuit of trying to earn a living while making ephemeral art, they will understand the life-altering experience of being able to document, display, and sell a physical object. Creating 43 small hanging sculptures for Nashville’s new Drift Hotel exemplified the reality of this realization. “[They] wondered if [they] too could not sell something and succeed in life.”

And yet, always drawn to the ineffable, Juliana’s visual art again veers away from the commodifiable and into the realm of what cannot be held onto. One may read ocean currents in the patterns enrobing the sculptures. Or well worn wind patterns. Or the paths carved by those escaping to find better lives for their families, as Juliana’s ancestors did when leaving Romania, when leaving Poland, when leaving Cuba, when leaving… The work invites you to touch its animal hide-like appearance; fur that converges into whorls of a fingerprint or spiral galaxy. At the same time each one is stoic, resistant and fragile, with its tarnished, sooty surface that speaks to a past event that has not been witnessed by the audience. A remnant from another life displayed, but not fully known.

These themes are present but Juliana expects and hopes that you’ll draw your own interpretations and relationships with the objects. 

Returning to performance, Juliana plans to disassemble the central sculpture, “Collapse,” over the month-long exhibit and then rejoin the tiles into a yet unknown sculpture by the closing date, June 16th.