Boulder, Colorado based artist, Julie Maren, has been focused on creating installations for the last several years. Originally a painter and sculptor, Maren blended her skills with her desire to challenge the boundaries of painting, bringing about a new unique medium—“Biophilia” installations—the perfect marriage of her passions. These installations are both wall sculpture and 3-dimensional paintings, and have allowed Maren a vehicle to transcend the omnipresent dot patterns in her paintings by transforming them into expansive, multi-dimensional arrangements of color and pattern that play with shape, microscopic and macroscopic perspectives and transform with light and shadow.
Letting her work evolve into these installations allows her to introduce another element to this union, and extend the intent of her work even further. Her choice of natural, artificial and recycled materials, such as acorn tops and industrial pigment remind of an engineered symbiosis or connectedness of nature and the artificial. Maren also uses the symbol of the acorn as a reminder of our interconnectedness with nature and to our larger community and world. Just as one seed can grow into a massive oak that can plant a whole forest, the acorn reminds us of our own potential and what/ how/ who we share with the world. While each individual Biophilia is complete on its own, they work more beautifully synergistically.
A Colorado native, Julie Maren received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her artwork is exhibited in the U.S. and abroad, and is part of worldwide private and corporate collections. She has illustrated two children's books, "Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa" and "An Orange in January," both for Dial/Penguin Books, received major grants from the Colorado Commission on the Arts and the Boulder Art's Commission. Her sculptural work was commissioned for Boulder's Pearl Street pedestrian mall and she has attended sculpture symposiums in Wellington, New Zealand, Bangalore, India and Marble, Colorado. Most recently, Maren, co-founder of "The Women's Art League" is featured in a short film with Judy Chicago, "The Famous Women Dinner Service: In Conversation with Contemporary Art,” by the Yale Center for British Art, filmed the Brooklyn Museum.