Just Passing Through

Just Passing Through
Julia Arredondo
(front gallery)

Exhibition statement:
Just Passing Through is an exercise in being seen. Transients often slip through the records of archivists, elude the tracking methods of government agencies, and go unaccounted for in the projected needs of a community. This invisibility is often deliberate—a safety mechanism for navigating new groups of people and unfamiliar regional customs. Just Passing Through offers me the chance to engage in conversation with Maine as someone “from away”—to exhibit the ways the region has shaped my creative practice, to reflect on the customs I’ve adopted (and also those I’ve resisted), and to express my gratitude for the craft traditions, popular motifs, and abundant landscape it has so generously shared with me.

What began as a three-month gig in Waterville evolved into nine months in Central Maine, a crash pad in Skowhegan, a summer on the Midcoast, a winter on Great Diamond Island, several stints on the Portland peninsula, and now—three years in Maine. To lifelong Mainers, that might not seem like much, but for travelers, it’s a significant stretch of time. Since moving to Maine, my materials palette has shifted. Ceramics and pine have entered the conversation, and my “paper tapestries” echo the quilting traditions deeply rooted in New England. As I grow older and move farther from my home in South Texas, I carry my culture and history with me–through jokes, slang, superstitions, and ideas. Along the way, I blend these elements with the iconography and sayings of the regions I visit, creating an ongoing dialogue between where I come from, where I’ve been, and where I’m headed. This interplay of influences reflects the complexity of the American experience—a constantly evolving identity shaped by movement, memory, and the blending of cultures. I inhabit this place broadly, this complicated and evolving identity is completely and totally American.

Julia Arredondo is a Tejana with working-class roots, navigating the changing landscape of creative economies within the United States. With a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Columbia College Chicago, Julia has held appointments as a Visiting Artist at Illinois State University, the Jaffe Center for Book Arts at Florida Atlantic University, Indigo Arts Alliance in Maine, and more.

Formally trained in printmaking, Julia specializes in screen printing and countercultural design. Her graphic aesthetic, rooted in analog processes, grew from her work designing for DIY spaces, where she explored zines as a medium for storytelling, self preservation, and community building. Julia explores archives as divinatory and transformative spaces, where shifting identities lend themselves to syncretic spiritual practices and the inherited narratives, imagery, and rituals we carry and evolve through time.

Funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state
agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.