Federal Building W(hole)
Julie Becker's work draws on a vast visual language that amalgamates personal history, pop culture, vernacular iconography, spaces and surfaces of Los Angeles. Becker lives in LA, and seems to absorb the dense, conflicted context of her environment with undifferentiating ferocity. Her working process, like the city, is labyrinthine - epic and interconnected, but at the same time fragmented and radically decentered. Her delirious, sprawling practice mirrors the structure of the post-modern city itself. Recalling the unfocused absorption of Walter Benjamin's viewer of both city and film, Becker engages the undifferentiated attention of distraction both as a creative production process and as a mode of reception. The resulting bodies of work, organized around projects that last several years, interweave the subliminal, the personal, and emotional with critical and conceptual perspectives with overwhelming intensity.
Frequently using liminal spaces such as corridors, waiting rooms or elevator shafts constructed within her own apartment, Becker locates her exploration of the outside world in interior - often psychologically charged - spaces and experiences. The film Federal Building: W(hole), 2002, is part of a total installation project Becker has been working on for over five years, an accumulating body of material that includes drawings, letters and interviews, photo-studies and film footage that center on the California Federal Bank, a building that looms over Echo Park and can be seen from the apartment in LA where the artist lives. Most of the jerky, home-movie footage is filmed inside her apartment, using a meticulously crafted model of the California Federal building and an elaborate, elevator-like shaft constructed inside a closet. A few brief glimpses of the actual building, at the beginning and the end of the film, frame twenty minutes of footage inside the apartment. Close-ups from a handycam strapped to the top of the model as it is lowered and raised gingerly through a hole cut into the floor are cut with images of wood panelling projected onto a screen in front of the same panelling in one room, or panning shots of surfaces cluttered with what looks like amateur scientific equipment - interspersed with views of the suspended model bank from above and below. A cassette tape found in the parking lot of the bank provides the film's soundtrack: the crazy lilting medley of Mariachi muzak lending an unhinged pace and tone to the imagery. Taken as a whole, this obsessive (25 minutes long), nostalgic, kitschy, opaque and anarchic film suggests a myriad possible narratives, from a hazy cityscape to conspiracy theories and political critique; a sense of everything in the world, all at once.
Copyright © 2008 by Julie Becker