Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

(John Berger, Ways of seeing, BBC, 1972)

In the work of Julia Yerger, seeing is never unpicked or resolved by attendant language. Her works are sticky to the ocular touch. They are distinctly limbic creatures, asking only to be seen but are hard to see and this inscrutability sets on course a restless engagement with them. Invitation and refusal seem to be issued in tandem.

Yerger’s collaged works on paper lend their smothered surfaces and quiet, quivering chaos to her paintings. Like in animation, these works present as an assembly of separate assets, yet there is also the feeling that these assets have been baked together at high temperature. Boundaries don’t dissolve, they melt, with edges unslipping from their markers. Explicit shapes emerge to briefly imply perspective, figuration, and place, only to recede into a stream of forced motion.

When lottery is composed of a suite of new oil paintings and works on paper. It is Julia Yerger’s first solo exhibition at Château Shatto.

Julia Yerger (b. 1993, Rockville, Maryland) received a Bachelor of Fine Art from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. Select solo and two person exhibitions include Kings Leap, New York; Clearing, Brussels; and New Low, Los Angeles. Select group exhibitions include Bel Ami, Los Angeles; The Wolford House, Los Angeles and Apartment 13, Providence. Yerger’s work has been featured in Cultured and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles.