Dault often fuses industrial and handmade practices, creating a sense of tension in production: using her body to bend stiff building materials, mechanically repeating her hand gestures, and wielding combs and squeegees instead of paintbrushes. In some cases, Dault treats materials—like vinyl, mirror, ribbon, and sequins—as paint to be scraped and pushed around. Counter to minimalist practices, Dault turns away from the pristine and the absolute; she is invested in artistic labour and access, purposefully revealing the many layers that make up her works and the inconsistencies that accrued in their making.

Dault pushes her explorations of accessibility and image building to a different level on the Museum's ground floor. Installed along the south wall is an industrial hanging system that hosts large-scale, dye-sublimation prints of one of her paintings and images drawn from a large personal collection that contains what she describes as “found abstraction.” Often these images serve as touchstones for paintings, akin to her other readymade materials. At this scale, Dault’s works are reminiscent of theatre backdrops or blown-up social-media photos. She is increasingly exploring how painting—handmade, unique, precious—can be redefined in relation to and complemented by other image technologies. In the installation in GTA21, Dault welcomes you to help produce the artwork and its meanings by physically swiping and recombining the scenes. The onset of the pandemic has led Dault to further consider the role of art and its audiences. Rather than beholding art from a distance, here Dault folds the viewer into its creation.

Similarly, Dault shares the production of her work with others in Guided by Voices, an installation also found on the ground floor. Here, she translates one of her recent paintings into hundreds of posters to be wheat-pasted on the wall, echoing an urban mode of mass communication: graphically, repeatedly, spontaneously. Dault's installation was executed by a wheatpaste professional with little to no instruction, other than to match the painting's lines where they see fit, producing an entirely new motif determined by their rhythm and intuition. The motif continues on the other side of the wall (a private office), visible only to the viewer through a pane of glass. Dault's project also foregrounds her interest in the mystery of abstraction, what information remains in and out of view and for whom.
Julia Dault (born 1977 in Toronto) has been featured in the New Museum’s triennial and the Marrakesh and Gwangju Biennales as well as in group exhibitions at the Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Her solo exhibition at the Power Plant, Toronto, and the Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver was accompanied by her first monograph, published by Black Dog Press. Her art is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, among others.

WORK IN GTA21:

Final Call, 2021

Dye-sublimated blackback polyester, galvanized steel, enamel

Courtesy Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen, CO; and China Art Objects, Mérida, Mexico.

Source Images:

Found photograph, 2009

New York Public Library Image Archive

Fluorite Specimen, County Galway, Ireland, 2018

Photograph by Stephen Blyskal

Through the Looking-Glass (Redux), 2021

With thanks to Trent Baker at Eventscape.

Guided by Voices, 2019–21

Acrylic and oil on canvas in painted wood frame

Courtesy Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen, CO; and China Art Objects, Mérida, Mexico.

Through the Looking-Glass, 2021

Acrylic and oil on canvas in painted wood frame

Courtesy Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen, CO; and China Art Objects, Mérida, Mexico.