Julie Speed's Talking Room @ Galleri Urbane

Galleri Urbane is curently showing TALKING ROOM an installation of Julie Speed's large graphite and gouache drawings on paper.

"I enjoy working in pencil but it’s usually the under-drawing for the oils so it’s lost almost as soon as I find it,” says Speed, when asked about her temporary departure from painting. “Last year I did a series of small pencil and oil drawings of heads which became the book HEADS. This year I was ready to come back to it and give the heads some hands.”

The images in TALKING ROOM are both ethereal and haunting. In Fat Chance a corpulent infant flails his chubby arms and wails in grief. In The Persistence of Lunacy an old man wields a missile launcher over one shoulder, using a forearm crutch to stabilize his meager frame. As with all of the figures in the series, the infant and the old man are silent, muted by an inaudible medium, and yet they are also nearly deafening with the imbued meaning. “After finishing the first three or four of these pieces I lined them up on the studio floor and saw that they were talking to each other,” says Speed. “That interested me so I kept going. As more of them entered the conversation I started thinking of them as an installation and wanted to crowd them into a small plain white room where it seemed they would be louder. I enjoy imagining what they’re saying but even more I enjoy imagining what other people imagine they’re saying.”

The dialogue is seductive, as are the beautiful lines and bizarre imagery that fills the room and follows you home. They seduce you with the sheer mastery of Speed’s technique and her signature zingers – the extra eye, the third row of teeth, the harrowing asymmetry. As with Speed’s paintings, there is a dichotomous quality to the work. It is playful and solemn, pulling you back and forth between characters, as if they’re telling you which drawing to listen to next.