They Live

Julie Wolfe’s book Apophenia taps into the optical unconscious to reveal something essential about perception. Through juxtaposing images across the pages, patterns emerge through free association, unleashing apophenia—the process by which humans make meaning out of incidental images. Over the decades, Wolfe has developed an archive of photographs, artwork and found objects that are organized in series. Throughout Apophenia, images are pulled apart from one another and placed in new configurations that inspire wonder and pose urgent questions. The book is wide-ranging in terms of subject matter—dream imagery, unknown species, aggressive plant life, knitting instructions, design solutions, artwork and data suggesting strategies for fee image associations, repair and recycling. This conglomeration inspires wonder and poses urgent questions. How do dissonant objects and images relate to one another? How do we relate to them? What can we learn by looking askance, by interrogating the unknown, and by opening ourselves to the unconscious? Through this archaeology of form, the viewer is asked to consider the hidden visual systems at play, their deep history, and their afterlives. The book presents a range of poetry, storytelling and essays. Julie Wolfe is a Washington DC based artist and founder of Apophenia Press and is known for her large abstract paintings, drawings on book pages, artists books and site specific installations.