My work is very process driven as I explore paint application processes of dripping, pouring, and staining fields of color onto surfaces, often working on the floor. Complimenting this gestural and chance-driven method, I then carefully work back into the pieces with intricate line-work, redefining solid shapes and voids, and often referencing figure. My most recent works on paper investigate the human body; it’s forms, functions, anatomical structures, and viscera. Through my creative process I recreate the body in layers echoing sheaths of organic systems, which are constantly in flux. My work reflects on themes surrounding death and decay in our culture, and contemporary science and technology’s influence on our concept of the body as a mutable physical substance. I want my work to evoke a sense of the grotesque; or a confrontation of and fusion of normally incompatible things; geometric and organic, man and beast, flora and fauna, internal viscera and outer shell, beautiful and repulsive, life and death, the decoratively abstract, and figuratively monstrous.


Julia Colavita was born in Philadelphia, PA on November 6, 1983. She completed her B.A. in studio art from Hartwick College in 2005, where she concentrated in painting, but also explored a variety of different mediums, including glassblowing, photography, and video art. Shortly after this in 2005 she studied and worked with art activist Checo Valdez and other international artists to facilitate community mural projects in Mexico, also returning recently to participate on a mural project in summer of 2009. In 2006 she was awarded a fellowship with the NEA-funded nonprofit organization ArtrainUSA, exhibiting her work and bringing the arts to small communities nationwide. She has been living and working in New York since summer of 2006, and most recently completed her MFA at the New York Academy of Art in May 2010.