Julie's art practice is research and process-driven with a strong literary component. Her art and creative work in digital media has afforded her multiple grants and awards over the years.
The Wishing Table is a project inspired by Tischlein, Deck Dich für Alle! Eine Betrachtung, a Socialist Labour pamphlet written in 1908 by Joseph Angerbauer. While the story is loosely based on the Brothers Grimm tale “The Wishing-Table, the Gold-Ass, and the Cudgel in the Sack”, it is rather a New York immigrant’s utopian vision of early 20th Century America that propels the narrative.
Tongue Rug : Tapis à langues is a project that is structured around the traditional tongue rug found in Québec and in Sweden. Similar to a patchwork rug, it is composed of overlapping felt tongues. The projet is a virtual sladdakavring that acts both as archive and "writing machine". Its final shape is unpredictable. It will grow piecemeal as a fluid structure, mutable, subject to randomness, time and the public's participation.
The Tongue rug (blog) and the path map document my cycling trips to each waypoint — lake, river, stream, body of water — with genealogical & geographical placenames. I can imagine an archive documenting my state of 'being lost'. Will the newest mapping technologies necessarily make my path more certain? Already the few paths I have drawn reflect the 're-routes', the 'circling-back' and the 'dead-end'. Loosened from the map, they become drawings, embroidery, threads scattered by time.
Reflets V, group show, April 2011
Maison de la Culture Marie-Uguay, Montreal, QC
MATHIEU, Marie-Christiane (2003). "Œuvre en processus pour public en développement, Stéphanie Lagueux et Julie Lapalme", Espace Sculpture, Montreal, Spring 2003, pp. 49-50.
This exhibition consisted of 6 Stop-Overs made up of assemblages — the three-dimensional sculptures which provided the basis for the digital animations in the Orphan Train - Trained Tales website.
Maison de la Culture: Rosemont/Petite-Patrie, Montreal, QC, January 2004
The Orphan Train - Trained Tales website is structured on a train journey: the Orphan Train travels on a Figure 8 Traintrack, with intersecting double loops making reference to the orphan/adoptee’s dual history. The train makes six Stop-Overs on the Tour: The Orphan Train Station, The Bed Box Theatre, The Bingo Staircase, The Home for Little Wanderers, The Dresser & the Closet, and The Bad Blood & Ghost Limbs Graveyard.
The project delves into the history of the closed adoption system, the growing adoption law reform movement in North America and the history of the Orphan Trains and its ties to adoption today in Canada.
Embedded in the Bed Box Theatre are inter-linked stories. The Story of the Bed Box Theatre tells of the emergence of a young girl's voice as she finds a theatre nestled in the spiral skeleton under her bed.
The animation, The Cuckoo in the Staircase: Gabriel Said, is a tale of Maria's creativity when faced with a difficult choice, in a parallel scenario of a saintly happening — with an alternate twist.
An excerpt from Virginia Woolf's essay, “Professions for Women” is re-told, as a Winding Staircase, Cuckoo Birds, Books, Bingo, and Polka Shoes surface through the dreams in the Bed Box Theatre. The computer becomes a tool for navigating through a miniaturized architecture in a landscape of memory and the imaginary.
Drawings, paintings and assemblages — inspired by Nova-Scotian domestic architecture — recalls families, the home, memory and identity.
bird, box & spindle: Anna Leonowens Gallery, Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax, NS, October 1995
Relic is a series of aluminum sculptures that uses disjointed pieces of chairs as a starting point for a deeper reflection on the absent body.
Esse Quam Videri (To be rather than to seem to be), 1996
Cast aluminium of a modified wooden chair back
Noli Me Tangere (Touch me not), 1995
Cast aluminium with steel wire coil of plaster casts
Declawed / Bones, 1995
Cast aluminium modified chair legs
Permanent collection, Nova Scotia Art Bank
A13 +: Foundry Group Exhibition with Dennis Gill
Cumberland County Museum, Amherst, NS, February 1996
(Artwork in show: Esse Quam Videri)
From Clay to Silver: Foundry Group Exhibition with Catherine Ross,
Anna Leonowens Gallery II, Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax, NS, August 1995
(Artwork in show: Noli Me Tangere, Declawed / Bones)
Laboratoire NT2 (Nouvelles technologies nouvelles textualités), promotes the reading, the study, the creation and the archiving of new textual forms & hypermedia works. Fugues, both a hypermedia adaptation of Piano (René Lapierre, Les Herbes rouges, 2001) and a critical reflection on the text itself, was a NT2 Collective production
Le Monument du Vide is a network Web art piece by Marie Christiane Mathieu with the collaboration of invited artists. Artists in various locations collaborated in real time on the Web creature's:
From the 11th to the 15th of November, 2001 Folie Culture invited four artists from various disciplines, Charles Guilbert, Guylaine Coderre, Martin Dufrasne and Julie Lapalme, to create a project under the theme of L'Enfermement du regard : Le regard de l'enfermement.
A website recaps the series of interventions and small creations which marked the week: texts, songs, photos, animations and videos.
BÉLANGER, Rodrigue, Gilbert Boss and al. (2004) « Le regard de l'enfermement » de Folie/Culture, Le Vertige de l'évidence : 2e année de photographie à Québec, p.87.