Julia Betts: The Dams Are Broken

Date and Time

• Wed, Sep 3, 2025 - Sat, Sep 27, 2025  

Location

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Details

Inspired by the simple act of watching her niece color, Julia Betts’s installation The Dams are Broken examines themes of confinement and liberation—and navigating the complex moments of vulnerability when boundaries are ruptured. Through this installation, Betts invites viewers to reflect on the fragile negotiation of bodily, emotional, and spatial boundaries.

With community participation central to Betts’s process, Akron residents were invited to document the intimate landscapes of their home environments by submitting photographs that captured cherished objects and personal spaces. These selected objects, highlighted through each participant’s lens, became integral materials within Julia’s installation—positioned not merely as artifacts, but as expressive anchors of the collective narrative. Through this collaborative and innovative process, Betts creates vibrant, abstract paintings by manipulating watery acrylics on saran wrap, breaking black rubber paste outlines, and mounting the resulting works onto plywood cutouts.

“With each piece, my intent—although never completely pre-determined—is to push a range of materials to the limits of their utility, while placing myself in precarious circumstances that simultaneously function as metaphors of emotional or psychic vulnerability and pure demonstrations of intentional disarray. Generally, I make a mess—but it’s a purposeful, highly textured mess.” –Julia Betts

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