Julia Jacquette Unrequited and Acts of Play

Julia Jacquette’s first major monograph presents an artistic exploration through the materialism, elitism, and idealization of past and contemporary society. Through her richly detailed paintings featuring imagery drawn from advertisements, New York–based artist Julia Jacquette addresses the challenges of navigating the contemporary media landscape that so directly influences our sense of personal identity and self-worth. Exposing our seemingly insatiable longing for a life that is purely a construct of the advertising industry, Jacquette’s work focuses on commercialized objects of desire: prepared meals drawn from 1950s cookbook illustrations, ornate interiors of the wealthy sampled from contemporary lifestyle magazines, shimmering swimming pools extracted from luxury ad campaigns. These material trappings are presented, often close up, in works that convey the pervasiveness of such evocative imagery.

Tracy L. Adler is the Johnson-Pote Director of the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.