Julia Haft-Candell
Monuments for the Overlooked
Photography: Hilary Fagadau
As women, at a certain point we start to realize how much we’ve been doing things for other people. Once we start really honing this energy for ourselves, then things get really awesome.
– Julia HAft-Candell
An Interview by: ElI mathis Cheatham
Nearly a year has passed since Julia and I first connected. Her solo exhibitions, Interlocking at Night Gallery and Carrier Bag of Fiction at Candice Madey Gallery, both held in the fall of 2020, so impressed me that I immediately messaged her. Since then, we have talked multiple times, and with each correspondence, I become more and more enthralled with the worlds she creates.
Eli Mathis Cheatham: While your work takes many forms, what is the common theme that runs throughout?
Julia Haft-Candell: Everything that I make comes from a central place, idea-wise. I’m making monuments to things that are usually insignificant, casual, or overlooked. I want people to rethink what is usually passed over quickly. Through highlighting these usually insignificant moments, I also hope to tell an alternate story of humans, evolution, and existence.
Photography: Makenzie Goodman
Volcano with Woven Feelers, 2020
Julia Haft-Candell
Photography: Ed Mumford
Interlocking Arch, 2020
Julia Haft-Candell
EMC: What inspires your work?
JHC: I’m interested in world-building, so much of my inspiration comes from fiction writers. I often think of my sculptures as recurring characters in a wider fictional world.
EMC: What does that world look like?
JHC: Well, it’s evolving. It’s happening as I make the work; it’s becoming more clear. A thread running throughout the world is the constant presence of paradox. Rather than this be a problem, in my world the paradox is necessary in order for everything to function well. Rather than there being a right and a wrong, things are both right AND wrong, and the viewer has to grapple with what that means in each situation. It’s a world that embraces complexity and nuance and the unknown, and all these things that I think we’re taught to fear, at least in western culture. Plus, I can only learn what the world looks like from making the work. As I’m intuitively making forms, I then question, ‘What is it about this form that interests me, and how does that connect to this idea of paradox?’ Objects start to evolve and move. A story is being formed, but I’m only learning about it little by little.
EMC: It’s presenting itself to you. Fascinating. At times you have presented your artworks in conjunction with a glossary. Is the glossary of terms something that you were defining for yourself?
JHC: The glossary is a way for me to track and start to shape what the world is. I presented it for the first time in 2017, printed as a zine that was available at my show called the infinite in Los Angeles. I showed it with a series of infinity sculptures that each had a carved motif relating to a different term in the glossary. Since then, the glossary has evolved. This year I want to make a new edition of the glossary, since it’s been evolving and changing. I’ve added terms; I’ve taken some away.
EMC: Are there things that you defined in 2017 that just don’t hold the same definition to you now or need to be adjusted?
JHC: Some of them really do, which is really cool, but a lot of them I just want to expand on more. I want to write more in-depth about each symbol. And then some terms aren’t that interesting to me anymore. And I think it’s important to keep checking in and evolving this world that I’m making.
Photography: Jeff McClane
Infinity: Water, 2017
Julia Haft-Candell
EMC: You have spoken briefly of your Infinity pieces. What is the story of how they came to be?
JHC: In my work, I have a lot of— no, in my life, I have a lot of interests that don’t always seem connected. I feel like a lot of my work is trying to make those connections between things that don’t seem related, but I find some spark of interest in all of them. Sometimes the downside of that is I feel very overwhelmed, and my work feels a little too spread out, too thin or something, too disparate…
EMC: I literally was having the exact same conversation yesterday about myself. So, I get it!
JHC: It’s good. I’ve learned over the years that it’s a good thing, but also the downside of it is that I often feel like, ‘Ahh, where am I centered?’ So I think in response, I wanted to focus on one form being almost like a canvas to then work off of. I thought if I have one thing as a standard in this exhibition, which became the infinity form, then I could really explore a lot of different ideas on that one thing and not feel totally scattered. That’s where it started, just deciding, ‘Ok. Let’s just make the infinity.’ And the infinity came from really just intuitive exploration with clay. At some point, I think maybe in 2014, I made my first infinity-esque form. A lot of the forms come about as an exploration of the process of working with clay and seeing the bodily forms that emerge. ‘What if I loop the clay around itself?’ I liked the challenge of having to maneuver and make these different iterations of the infinity form. At this time, late 2016/early 2017, I was also working on this glossary of terms and symbols.
EMC: It was this exhibit that you first did the glossary in the form of a zine?
JHC: Exactly. So they really emerged together while I was building the infinities and thinking about these forms, and analyzing myself and questioning, ‘Why do I like the infinity? What are the social implications? What are the political implications? Personal…?’ I realized that it was all of these things that I was interested in coming together in this form: body, science, spirituality, and this very paradoxical form in itself because it’s supposed to represent something that’s unrepresentable. I really liked that. Through working back and forth from the writing in the glossary to what I was making in the studio, I decided to focus the surface of each one with this carved motif that would then relate back to an entry in the glossary, like “arch” and “combs" and “legs.” I was inventing patterns made from the forms I had been making. I had been making legs—sculptures of legs, so I decided to put that in the glossary and think about, ‘Why am I interested in legs and this kicking motion? Where does that come from, and what does that mean historically and sociopolitically?’ When I wrote the original glossary, I was reading The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, who’s been really influential in my work. In this novel, the inhabitants of Gethen don’t express one gender or another until they’re going to mate. They’re androgynous. They think that humans are perverts for expressing a binary gender all the time. It’s one of those wonderful things that fiction and science fiction does where it makes the reader realize how arbitrary our systems are, our ways, and how we pass judgments on things as “off” or “weird,” but really, it’s just based on social standards. I was really drawn to this idea. I was thinking about my experience and frustration with people trying to place identity onto me as a woman.
EMC: There’s this idea that there’s a dance of a family or of a society. Everyone has their particular steps, and the moment that one person begins to change their ways, everyone else is tripping over themselves because they no longer know the steps. It makes people really uncomfortable when you say, ‘Hey, that’s just not my truth.’ Or, ‘That’s not how I want to move through the world.’
JHC: Totally. It’s easier to control people when you’re saying, ‘This is how you have to be,’ and people feel like they have to fit into that. There’s a lot of paradox in my experience as a woman. Growing up, I felt like I had to choose if I was going to be this kind of woman or that kind of woman. I don’t want to choose. The glossary came from that; in the glossary I say that the most power comes from forms that embody both ends of a gender spectrum. The binary is necessary, but the best things happen when there’s something in between. Before I got to the infinity, actually, I came up with an origin story for a glossary that started with a torus and a dash, an opening and a phallus, and thinking about binary code relating to that, thinking about two separate parts that intersect. I thought of the torus and the dash as being the ends of the spectrum of a binary and all of the other forms as being some kind of morphing of these two forms. So the arch could be the torus that had a flat bottom and a curved top, or the infinity could be the dash, which is the line that kind of circles in on itself.
So I began to write this origin story for all of the forms based on these two basic shapes. Each definition discussed gender: the infinity form represents the coexistence of all genders with its thrusting phallic line that makes up the openings. Also, depending on how it was shaped, narrow or wide, it could really resemble one of these shapes more than the other one. In the definition for infinity, I reference hermaphroditic organisms that can be either gender, depending on their survival, in order to mate. Insects do that; I think some worms maybe.
Photography: Jeff McClane
Infinity: Legs, 2017
Julia Haft-Candell
Growing up, I felt like I had to choose if I was going to be this kind of woman or that kind of woman. I don’t want to choose.
– Julia HAft-Candell
EMC: That’s where the intuition comes in, right? In our first conversation and then again right now, we talked a lot about paradox. This idea that something is good or bad, or that you have to choose. This last year—I want to say ‘I’ve been forced to learn,’ but maybe it’s better to view it as the universe has given me the opportunity to learn—to be able to hold two things that seem to be in complete contradiction. To hold them both and know that each holds truth—that they do not cancel each other out. As you talk about your work, and even as I just look at your work, that seems to be a wisdom and a quality that you really hold. Talk more to that and how you deal with that.
JHC: That’s such a big part of what I’m trying to do with the work. So the fact that it’s doing that—is very exciting. I have a hard time with that in my day-to-day experience, too. My work is expressing this gray area that I have a really hard time wrapping my head around, so I make it into a visual. I’m making artwork to have a visual of something that I need to see. I think acknowledging the gray area is really necessary in order to make a more functional society, to make humans happier.
EMC: There’s so much truth in that. I really appreciate you saying that one of the reasons that you work on it in your art is because it’s so hard in life.
JHC: It’s so hard!
EMC: I remember when I first started writing, there was this idea that I wasn’t allowed to write about something until I understood it completely. Then I began to realize that the writing was often what brought on the knowing.
JHC: You don’t know it until you write it. I feel similar.
EMC: You have described your studio as ‘an alternate dimension where intuition rules.’ Will you share some practices with us that you find most helpful in connecting with your intuition? For you, how do you know when what is leading is in fact intuition vs something else such as fear or ego?
JHC: Yeah! I love that question. It’s not easy to separate those out. An ego can be so crafty, to try to sneak up when it knows you’re trying to not listen to it. I’d say the number one thing that I try to do is to slow down. Time tells what is intuition and what is not. What happens with me is I feel a lot of things, and I’m not really sure what it all is. I feel like something’s off, or my body tells me before my brain knows. In the past, there’s been this disconnect where I’ll feel sick, and it’s my body telling what my mind won’t acknowledge. Meditation helps me be more present with my feelings; it helps me be more friendly with them. These feelings are uncomfortable; they are intense and confusing and I can’t always explain them, and that can be scary. But meditation allows me to be more comfortable with all of those confusing thoughts. Just relaxing with them makes them clearer. I also swim laps and that is super helpful. I feel like being underwater is really helpful for getting in touch with intuition. I think exercise, in general, is good. I try to do some sort of exercise, and that also helps to figure out what is generalized anxiety and what is intuition.
EMC: Absolutely. Moving my body and meditation is so important for me, because sometimes there’s too much inner—or not too much, but there’s just a lot of energy in here, so some of it just needs to get out so that there’s enough space to be able to listen or be more grounded. I get that for sure.
JHC: It makes me also realize that’s gotten easier over the years. I do think a lot of it is trying to be more comfortable with and welcome all of those feelings and be kind to them. There’s a tendency that I have when I meditate of trying to push away thoughts and how that doesn’t work at all—to sort of be like, ‘No! Get out of here! Get out of my head!’ And they’d just come back louder. So to have a lot of kindness towards even your own strange thoughts and distracting thoughts and realize, ‘Okay, you’re here, but I don’t want to listen to you.’ Treating all these different parts of yourself as real parts and not pushing them away.
Photography: Brice Bischoff
Time tells what is intuition and what is not.
– Julia HAft-Candell
EMC: You had a teacher who said, “Create the work that you’d want to produce if you knew death was imminent.” Is that something you think about often, and how has that advice impacted the work you create and just how you look at your art in general?
JHC: It’s funny because in context when I got that advice, I was like, ‘What are you talking about? If I knew I was going to die, I would go hang out with my family and not make artwork.’ But then over the years, it’s come back to me at many points, because I think the idea behind it is, ‘Make work that you really want to make for you and nobody else.’ It seems simple, but it’s so not! Partially because of all of the interests I have, so I think ‘That would be cool!…And that would be cool!’ But also the pressure from outside, like a gallery or a peer who’s giving you feedback. So keeping that in my mind has been really helpful.
Even though clay is this very ancient material, in terms of how ceramics has been recognized in Western art history as an art form, it’s pretty recent. Because of that, there’s this pressure I feel, or maybe I felt—eh, maybe I still feel—that I have to do something new for the medium, within the medium. I have to push it in some new way and do something different with it. I recognize that as a thing I come up against over and over, starting from grad school. It’s something that I learned in grad school and then have had to unlearn. I think it relates very closely to that question of ‘What would you make if you were going to die?,’ because I wouldn’t care if it was gonna be something that would be cool for clay, because it’s about something bigger than that. Especially for me. I love clay, but my ideas are not about clay necessarily or singularly.
EMC: You use it to represent your ideas.
JHC: Exactly. So that’s something I try to separate, like, ‘Is this something I wanna make for me, or is it something that I think would validate the work in Clay World?’ Also, I’m trying to pinpoint any external things vs internal, like external demands. ‘Would I be doing this for approval or to impress or to make a point?’ That’s a big one, doing something to make a point. I tend to be pretty rebellious, so sometimes I’ll realize I’m just doing something as a form of rebellion, to stir things up. But I think thinking slowly through whether something is an external force is essential.
EMC: I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. For so much of my life, I’ve either done what I was supposed to, or I’ve actively rebelled against it. But both of those choices were still working within a system that wasn’t my own. Slowly I am learning exactly what you’re speaking of with your art. To have my choices and actions come from internal truth versus external pressure. It’s a journey.
JHC: Yeah, it’s a journey.
EMC: I do it much better some days than others.
JHC: Yes, same! I think it’s such a journey for women specifically, and maybe why some of my favorite artists make their best work when they’re really old. At a certain point with women, we start to really realize how much we’ve been doing things for other people. Once we start really honing this energy for ourselves, then things get really awesome.