link to Julie Ault at Galerie Buchholz New York 2015

Alfred A. Hart’s stereoscopic photograph of tree stumps cut by the Donner Party in the winter of 1846 marking the height of the snowfall that stranded the emigrants in the Sierra Nevada on their migration west. Martin Wong’s compassionately rendered 1985 painting of a closed Avenue B storefront depicts a casualty of irrevocable gentrification. Julie Ault’s essay “Dishes, Diaries, and Cemeteries” speaks about her great aunt’s planned redistribution of household belongings after her passing. Matt Wolf’s slide show gives insight into his exploration of the assembly of personal treasures in David Wojnarowicz’s “Magic Box” . . .

afterlife, Julie Ault’s first exhibition at Galerie Buchholz, expands from her contribution to the 2014 Whitney Biennial and, in Ault’s words, “unites artworks, artifacts, texts, and publications as equivalent participants in a conversation about disappearance and recollection.” Without declaring themselves as belonging to the realm of artworks or non-artworks, fiction or fact, the elements composing afterlife suggest their potential as records of the past, items that relay meaning between the living and the dead, and the present and the absent.

Two paintings and three hand-lettered drawings by Martin Wong
A slide show by Matt Wolf
Three photographs by David Wojnarowicz
Three photogravures by Danh Vo
An interview with Marvin Taylor
An apparition concerning Liberace
A sculpture by Robert Kinmont
A stereoscopic photograph by Alfred A. Hart
Two paintings and a multiform work by James Benning
A photograph and a publication (and errata) by Martin Beck
A composite essay by Julie Ault
Artifacts and documents from The Downtown Collection
An anonymous ledger drawing
A crate of personal effects

Julie Ault (b.1957) is an artist, curator, writer, and editor who works independently and in collaborative constellations. Ault’s recent projects include Nancy Spero: Codex Artaud, 2015, and the collectively organized Tell It To My Heart, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel, Culturgest, Lisbon, and Artists Space, New York, 2013 – 2014. Ault was a founding member of the New York-based collaborative Group Material (1979–1996) and is the editor of Show and Tell, 2010, which chronicles the group’s practice. Spanning nearly four decades Ault’s expansive work has taken many forms, addressing the political, personal, and collaborative dimensions of art.