Statement
My paintings and visual constructions reveal the multi-layered ways personal memory, collective experience, and cultural history take on material forms. In my art, I consciously work to create a sense of an intimate archive that reaches across time by integrating found objects, distressing elements and aging materials in order to reveal how corrosion, rust and wear accumulate on bodies and surfaces over time.
Bio
Julia LaChica is an Oakland based multidisciplinary visual artist. Her work layers histories and cultures into mixed media assemblages of meaning. Through drips, marks and scratches on surfaces left behind, she reveals stories of migration, mourning, and the promise of belonging. A native San Franciscan, Julia grew up in the Ping Yuen public housing complex in Chinatown as one of four children raised by her single Nikkei mother and the shadow of her Filipino father. As a young queer teen in San Francisco, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and surrounded by the cultural aftermath of the Summer of Love, she dropped out of high school to run wild in a wild city. Eventually LaChica returned to school and received her BFA in Industrial Design from the California College of the Arts in 2001, and went on to design furniture, lighting and decorative accessories. In 2020, the twin circumstances of COVID and the outpouring of political protest against racial violence, inspired her to shift her focus to full time visual arts.
