Scattered Remains: Photography by Julie Gautier-Downes

Bio:  Julie Gautier-Downes was born in San Diego and relocated to New York City in 2001, prompting her bi-coastal identity and interest in perceptions of home. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2011 and her Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014.

In 2015, Gautier-Downes was an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center and won Best In Show for her installation in Guess You Had To Be There at the Peoria Gateway Building. In 2016, she won Best Still Life in the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts’ 2016 International Photography Competition and was awarded a Grants for Artist Projects (GAP) 2016 Grant from the Artist Trust. She has exhibited her work in solo and group shows across the United States and in the United Kingdom. Gautier-Downes has had her photographs published in Ain’t Bad Magazine, Dazed Digital, the Hand Magazine, Ohio Edit, and Phosmag. She currently resides in Spokane, Washington.

Gautier-Downes’ studio practice is the investigation of somatic traces left in barren landscapes that become artifacts of the past. The domestic vestiges that now haunt these spaces are transformed into a narrative waiting to be deciphered. Her process involves documenting or recreating deserted houses and abandoned items that allude to the home and family. The spaces she records seem to be in a perpetual state of disarray, imbuing the notion that a single event stimulated the need for the inhabitants to leave hastily. Gautier-Downes re-frames each scene into her rendition of the stories each space unveils. The accounts she relays reveal the trauma each housing structure suffers as it slowly decomposes into the environment as well as the physicality of displacement. 

www.juliegautierdownes.com

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