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Part 1: Hands/Feelers

Part 2: The Infinite Library


September 23-December 8, 2023



Julia Haft-Candell: The Yet To Be

The interdisciplinary work of artist Julia Haft-Candell comprises ceramic and bronze sculptures, drawings and paintings, and installation. Her evolving entity known as The Infinite is an alternative world with its own, values, ethics, and visual language; all documented in The Infinite: Glossary of Terms and Symbols. The Infinite seeks to produce forms of knowledge unconstrained by conventional systems or classifications, while referencing ancient structures of communication. This ethos is reflected in The Infinite School, the experimental art school that she runs from her studio, which seeks to produce alternative forms of knowledge that challenge conventional institutional practices and pedagogies.

The Infinite is central to the exhibition at Pitzer College Art Galleries and unravels across two sites titled The Yet To Be—Part 1: Hands/Feelers and Part 2: The Infinite Library. The ceramic works in Part 1: Hands/Feelers manifest hands interlocking with motifs of knots, chains, and infinity symbols carved onto their surface. These works articulate her evolving Glossary and are explored in image and text-based drawings and a stop-motion animation. Part 2: The Infinite Library formulates a participatory space. Shelving doubles as seating and is stocked with books selected by over sixty-five artists. Functioning as a respite for collective and solitary contemplation, with the generative ethos of The Infinite, the library will host readings, discussions, and conversations on art theory and practice, science fiction and craft, as well as building alternative frameworks throughout the exhibition. A third component of the exhibition, taking the form of an archive documenting the history, philosophy, and work of The Infinite School, further elucidates Haft-Candell’s conception of The Infinite.

Included in The Infinite Library are two central texts inspirational to Haft-Candell’s thinking—Octavia Butler’s post-apocalyptical novel The Parable of the Sower (1993) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s visionary essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986). In Butler’s future, dramatically impacted by climate change, the protagonist goes in search of Earthseed, a religion whose God shape-shifts through individual worship. While Butler reimagines the future, Le Guin reinterprets the human origin story by replacing the spear as the first tool with a carrier bag—for gathering and distributing food, objects, and stories for sharing—attributing community building as foundational rather than singular (heroic) aggression. In privileging storytelling as a creative force, Le Guin reminds us, as Donna Haraway has remarked, that “it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with,”[1] values embedded in Haft-Candell’s The Infinite.

[1] Donna Haraway, “Introduction,” in Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (London: Ignota, 2019), 10.

Press Release

This exhibition is generously supported by the Pitzer College Ceramics Studio and Residency; CANDICE MADEY, New York; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles.

More Information

October 27-December 10, 2022

1 Rivington Street

New York, NY 10002

CANDICE MADEY is pleased to announce the gallery’s second solo exhibition with LA-based Julia Haft-Candell, A Soft Grid, presenting new mixed media paintings that incorporate marble dust and bronze, sculpture in bronze and clay, and a large-scale work on paper. Throughout this exhibition and her work in general, a recurring lexicon traverses material form and connects the non corporeal and more ethereal aspects of her practice.

October 29-December 10, 2022

Dreamsong is pleased to announce Dissolving Margins, a two-person exhibition featuring sculpture by Julia Haft-Candell and recent paintings by Maria Kozak. The exhibition title references an Italian term central to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels ‘smarginatura,’ translated as ‘dissolving margins’ by Ann Goldstein, and described as “the sensation of moving a few fractions of a second into a person or a thing or a number of a syllable, violating its edges.”

Dissolving Margins highlights conceptual and formal reverberations between Kozak and Haft- Candell’s distinct practices. In particular, both artists undermine hard binaries by imagining hybrid forms. Kozak, working in oil paint, and Haft-Candell in ceramic, upend the delineation of stable categories through embracing ambiguity and porous borders. In sensuous oil paintings and ceramic sculptures that that trace the body while gesturing towards abstraction, forms seep, bleed and interlock through the alchemy of touch.


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