Fraktur Fire and Elemental Inventories

Exhibition (space 105)
April 17 — May 31, 2025

Paper Talisman Worshop
April 17, from 3:30 PM to 4:30 PM

Opening Reception (space 105)
April 17, from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM

Join the artists from 3:30 to 4:30 before the opening on April 17, to create your own paper talisman. Choose from three hand-drawn risograph-printed talismans and then collage into it a unique collection of handmade paper and digitally-printed pieces. Each paper talisman can be arranged to harness specific powers to guide, protect or empower the user. Begin with an intention, arrange as you please, and embrace the magic. Sign-up by filling up the form the link below : https://forms.gle/AWoM6SaxBKdsnKLT6

---

Text by Chloë Lum

Magic is the process of making hope. Something from something. Something of word, something of thing. Art is alchemy. Through assembling interests, processes, material, and knowledge artists can create meaning. Collaborative practices bring in more threads of obsession and method, weaving them together with deft attention to detail, making something complex and strong and often strange. Something from something. Even when not engaging with magic as subject or process, art is a form of magic, the studio a site of ritual. Process, a spell.

Aluminium, paper, pigment. Printed words.

Read them aloud, and once more under your breath.  

Move the air, displace it as you speak.

(Pause.)

Breathe in this place.

(Hold.)

(Release.)

 A collection can be assembled, a collection can be also made. Objects that mirror objects. Yes, real fakes. The systems create and they link, amplify power, tell stories, let us glimpse the secret life of the thing.  Keep them in place, just so.

Ordered. Arranged.

When artists set out to create magical objects and incantations, the result is magic on magic. It’s louder, brighter.  Jason Urban and Leslie Mutchler offer this, using the visual language of a natural history museum, an archive. They offer access to their shifting inventory of talismanic objects and spells, purpose-made for today. We need this kind of magic.

The life cycle of things? Magic. Being together? Magic. Making sense of the world? Magic. What is magic other than putting objects, ideas, situations together, remaking the world; one gesture at a time?

---

JASON URBAN and LESLIE MUTCHLER (JULMstudios) have been working collaboratively since 2012; they live and work in Brooklyn, New York. As a collaborative duo, they exercise a coequal approach to art and life that focuses on research and problem-solving. With a relationship of physical to metaphysical in mind, their practice is increasingly about the natural world and the way digital technologies influence and distort our relationship to nature.

The pair has had solo exhibitions at Eastern Edge (St. Johns, Canada), Center for Book Arts (New York, NY), Monaco (St. Louis, MO), the Delaware Contemporary (Wilmington, DE), NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia, PA), The Print Center (Philadelphia, PA), Centre for Fine Print Research (Bristol, UK), Space Gallery (Portland, ME), Atelier Circulaire (Montreal, Canada), among others. They have been awarded numerous residencies including Edition/Basel in Basel, Switzerland, Cork Printmakers International Visiting Artist Residency in Cork, Ireland and Dieu Donne Workspace Residency in Brooklyn. Both are affiliated with Pratt Institute where Mutchler is Chair of the Foundation Program and Urban teaches publishing courses in the Communication Design program.

JULMkit

@julmstudios 

2025