Julie Weitz

Julie Weitz (born 1979, Chicago) is an American visual artist living and working in Los Angeles. Weitz was trained as a painter, and taught painting at the University of South Florida for eight years.[1][2] She began to experiment with video in 2010. Her recent work concerns the experience of the self in the modern world, where virtual and embodied experience mingle.[1] In addition to digital editing tools, Weitz has used a variety of physical materials to create video, including paint, smoke, prefabricated sculpture, and the human body. She has also collaborated with musicians, including Paul Reller and Benjamin Wynn.[3][1]

Weitz's interactive installation Touch Museum (Young Projects Gallery, 2015) garnered national attention, with features in Artforum,[4] the Los Angeles Times,[1] Gizmodo,[5] and on radio station KCRW.[6] The installation was explicitly designed to trigger physical sensations in the viewer using the methods of Autonomous sensory meridian response. Tactile stimuli (egg foam carpeting, velvet walls), auditory stimuli (whispered binaural readings from Henri Bergson), and visual stimuli (layered videos reflected in mirrors, colored smoke) combined to blur the boundaries between perception and reality, creating a sense of "euphoric discombobulation."[4] Weitz has described her use of physical props and pigments in her videos as an "anti-CGI aesthetic" inspired by 1970's SciFi.[1] Weitz has had solo exhibitions at Young Projects (Los Angeles), Eastern Star Gallery (Los Angeles), Chimento Contemporary (Los Angeles), Cunthaus (Tampa, FL) and The Suburban (Oak Park, IL). In 2013 she moved to Los Angeles, before her moving Weitz was a tenured professor at the University of South Florida. As of 2018 she teaches in Los Angeles and is a regular author at Contemporary Art Review, Los Angeles.[7]