'22 lames' by Julie Monot at A.ROMY, Geneva

22 LAMES presents artist Julie Monot’s dive into more allegorical work, navigating between carpet sculptures of mythical women and tarot cards. The sculptures and tarot are a simultaneous genesis of one another, a photograph of her daughter becomes a tarot card and the tarot card then became a wool sculpture. Julie Monot stays true to her common theme of movement and transformation, her tarot cards are used less to predict the future, but instead as a key to reveal a truth about one-self. This exhibition is a circle that closes on itself as each aspect of the exhibition is linked to another. 

Each carpet is made using a mix of wool, cotton, and synthetic latex. Each piece is an exploration of the various roles women were in, or in most cases in Mythology, were forced to take. From Medusa and her hundred origin stories of total oppression and the colonisation of her body not only by the Gods but by the mortal men surrounding her. To harpies and the violent life they were cursed to lead, on one hand seen as beautiful women but then on the other feared and hated because of the power they held in their physical forms. To mermaids and their enchanting calls, again, with their beautiful upper bodies but terrifying power that killed hundreds of sailors. The theme in this is not hard to grasp, the barely visible line between being desired and hated is a conflict women are still forced to undergo to this day. 

With alma mater from la HEAD and l’ECAL in Visual Arts, Julie Monot is no stranger to working with vastly different mediums in her artistic approach, ranging from medium format photography, to videography, to installations, to performance and sculpture. 

Her works have been shown in various Swiss art-spaces such as La Becque in La-Tour-de-Peilz; at Salts in Basel; at the Arsenic in Lausanne; l’ELAC in Renens; and at Le Commun in Geneva. But also outside Switzerland in various spaces in Paris with Artagon; l’espace DOC, Paris; and at the Swiss Institue in Rome. In February 2020, Monot will perform with Julien Monot in a show curated by Elise Lammer at The Grotto, Lisbon. She is also currently taking part to a residency at Arsenic, Lausanne.

Previously working with prosthetics and make-up, this has now become a part in her multi-faceted approach to representation of the corporal body and what is means to exist within in our current age. This thinking is seen clearly in her work as she searches to explore the way the body is used and limited in the artistic approach we know today.