Julia Gorton “Faces - Portraits & Cut-ups from nYC 1976-2024”

Julia Gorton is a visual artist using photography and collage as her main medium.
Her career began documenting the prolific DIY music scene of downtown Manhattan in the 1970’s, taking pictures of hundreds of bands and musicians such as Debbie Harry, Lydia Lunch, Tom Verlaine, The Screamers, The Damned, James Chance and the Contortions, and DNA.

Julia and Rick Brown, her partner at the time, started the zine Beat It! in which she used her photographs adding cut-ups, DIY lettering and patterned backgrounds to create a visual aesthetic that helped shape the visual identity of the Punk, Post-Punk and No-Wave scene , a visual identity that is still emulated today.

Her work has been used in seminal album covers and it has been exhibited throughout the world in galleries and institutions like KATA GALLERY in Tokyo, DOOMED GALLERY in London, The International Center of Photography, The Museum Of The City Of New York, The Brooklyn Museum, MOMA, Museum Of Arts And Design, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She now shares this extensive body of work at Selva.

Through the decades Julia has maintained her obsession with photographing people. With an empathetic and curious eye, she creates glamorous portraits of people she finds interesting or total strangers that come to her Open Studio Portrait Series, creating relationships through documenting people.

This exhibition presents an overview of her works throughout the decades, showing the original pages with photos and collages made for the zine Beat It!, pieces from the recent Open Studio Portrait Series, original collages from the Pretty in Punk and Post Pink series, her seminal photos from the late 1970’s bands, and a table with ephemera also from that time.

As part of the residency, Julia was present at Selva for four days with the Open Studio Portrait Series, documenting enthusiasts and the people that came by.