Julee Holcombe - January 2023

“The Passage” by Julee Holcombe

Julee Holcombe (b.1972) lives and works in New England. She received her MFA in Photography and Electronic Media at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Her work questions photography's truth-telling ability in which to distill our sense of time and curiosity. Her work is documentary, fictional, and autobiographical, reflecting today's world. The landscapes she documents can be decades apart or miles apart as they are reassembled to create mythical realities.

Holcombe's current work, Mythic Patterns, is a slow meditation of our cultural past, culminating and appropriating source materials from magazines, books, and her photo archive. The work reassembles remote “mythic patterns” that mirror the current cultural shifts of a culture devoted to individualism. The work explores the balance of a more "collective" and "universal" experience that reveals the complex nature of the human condition in search of spiritual intimacy.

Holcombe's work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably at the British Museum of Art in London, England; Portland Museum of Art, ME; DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA and the Phoenix Museum of Art. She has received numerous awards and residencies, including a full fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her photographs are in several private and public collections: the Portland Museum of Art, the Fitchburg Art Museum and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.

Photo by Enrique Mendía