Julia Gutman’s face and body appear everywhere in the textile work, populating its woven tableaux. Here, two figures sit in a state of intimacy and dislocation—facing opposite directions, while simultaneously resting against one another. They are together and yet apart. Just beyond them, a group throws a limp form of another figure into the air. And further on, to the right, a pair of figures are entangled in a violent scene, with the blade of a sword pressing down on an overpowered body, which lies below. Gutman’s image is in every one of the scenes, yet because of this repetition the individual person also ceases to really be in any of them. The monumental textile is not a retreat into narcissism, but a push to understand the limits of our own image.
The repeated image of the artist is, in a way, a proxy for all of us. It stands in for our urge to be understood, the impossibility of encapsulating the complexities of our own experience, and the inadequacy of our public projections. Most challengingly, the multiplied selves of Gutman’s work suggest the inevitable warping of our image that occurs as it moves through the world, becomes unmoored from us, and is moulded by the hands of others. “Someone writes a memoir at 22 and then they’re 50 and they still have to speak to whatever they were,” Gutman explains. “The irony is that the more that you try to explain who you are to people the more likely you are to flatten yourself and lose your capacity to change or be complicated.”