Julie Liger-Belair

Julie Liger-Belair
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

STATEMENT

Julie Liger-Belair says about the series, “In the rooms of my mind”:

I love houses. The simple little image of a triangle on top of a square that all kids learn to draw early on and most every one around the world recognizes as a symbol for “dwelling’ and ‘home” is so evocative and stimulates my imagination in so many ways. The house can symbolize the place where we are most comfortable, most ourselves, a place of warmth and protection. But it can just as easily symbolize a place where we feel trapped or where bad things can happen out of the public eye. The house can symbolize our inner world, the windows being our eyes that can look both in or out, that can divulge the inner turmoil or on the contrary keep it well hidden behind drawn curtains. For this reason I love drawing houses with no doors allowing entry or exit and only windows to see in or out of, a both comforting and scary notion.

For this latest series, I have chosen to paint on older paintings. I love the act of recycling older work, allowing some of the images to show through and so starting a conversation (if you will) between the new ideas and older ideas.

BIO

I am a visual artist in Toronto.

I attended the Ontario College of Art and Design, where I studied printmaking, photography, illustration and metal-smithing. Early in my art career, I started collecting cabinet cards/Victorian-era photographs and they became the launching point for my ideas and imagery.

For the past 20 years, I have been making assemblage pieces or three dimensional collages, using found objects, photos, paper ephemera and Japanese paper in hand-made frames/boxes or found containers. My work has slowly evolved over the years and I am now working on larger scale pieces that combine painting and collage on wood cradle boards. I’ve participated in many solo and group shows in Canada, the USA and Europe. My work has been included in several art books, magazine articles and literary publications as well as being used on book covers and commissioned for posters.

I work in my garage studio where I sometimes allow my husband, three kids and little black dog, Frida, to visit.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
www.julieligerbelair.net

IMAGES