Within this set of ten paintings — entitled Living Rooms, based on the floor-plan of the second-storey living spaces of her home in Chicago — Julia Fish has, in her words, ” investigated various ways to paint and inscribe inhabited experience: to picture what it means to live within and move through rooms that open onto each other, occupied in close, proximate terms.” Living Rooms can best be understood as a set, not a series, of images: one painted subject in ten parts; all of the images and surfaces were developed concurrently. Each canvas articulates a specific interior room configuration and the threshold space(s) to any adjoining room or passageway, oriented as either north- or south-facing, at a scale of 1:7. Each painting is subtitled by the spatial orientation of the room / space and indications of movement: for example, SouthEast, with lights, action.

Fish began work on the paintings in 2003, following completion of an initial and extended sequence of studies / works on paper, 2001-2002. The ten Living Rooms are the most recent of Fish’s long-term investigation of the 1922 storefront residence where she lives and works in Chicago. Since the early 1990’s she has recorded the visual incidents and structural configurations of walls, floors and windows in paintings and works on paper that function as an extended archive of place, material fact, and temporal experience of the domestic site.

: excerpts, press release / Anthony Grant, Inc. 2005.