SUBMISSION DEADLINE: MAY 7, 2025
Please upload a video of your home or space. Artist Julia Betts will review and assess the videos' suitability for her installation. She may reach out to request additional images for inclusion in her work.
SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS:
Using your phone, create a minute video that showcases your living space (whatever areas you feel comfortable sharing). Go slow. Include a view of your face or full body in some part of the video. It should be around 2 minutes long, but no longer than 5 minutes.
From these submitted videos, Julia will choose her participants. If she chooses to move forward with your video, she will email you a list of objects from the video to additionally photograph.
She will then make a painting of you and your objects! Some participants will be selected and included as part of her residency installation at Akron Soul Train. Other participants will be on display at future exhibitions.
Due to the volume of potential submissions, only those selected to participate will be notified by the artist.
FROM THE ARTIST JULIA BETTS:
In this project, I explore the body as a fragile vessel—a container of identity that delineates the self from the world beyond. Yet within it stirs a restless desire: a hunger to rupture those boundaries and let identity spill forth, dissolving into something limitless and unconfined. These arrangements become portraits, not just of people, but of the spaces they inhabit and the items that shape them. These portraits reflect the overwhelming density of modern life, where we are bound to the material world by the sheer weight of what we own. Each figure in the installation embodies this tension; some rise, buoyed above the swell of their surroundings, while others sink, dissolving into the accumulated mass of their possessions. Psychologically, I draw upon Freud’s concept of the “oceanic feeling,” a state in which the boundaries between self and the external world dissolve, creating an overwhelming sense of oneness. When these mental barriers break, the figures either collapse into formlessness or stretch toward self-actualization, struggling to re-establish their individual identity.