Julia Scher Sanctuary, 1984

In Sanctuary, a landscape painting rendered with acrylic, plaster, and gel on canvas, Scher employs a palette dominated by earthy greens, ochres, and beiges, punctuated by a striking horizontal bar of bright blue suggesting a silver lining. At the center, rows of compartmentalized white and matte orange rectangles contain faint grey human figures, silhouettes or partial torsos. Surrounding and hovering above them are ghostly creatures painted in pitch-black that verge on mere abstraction.

In the 1980s, Julia Scher began exploring the interplay of landscape, technology, and the body. As a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, she painted grand depictions of both her native Sierra Mountains and the broad Midwestern plains, using these works to meditate on human presence in and her attachment to these landscapes. Scher describes delving into the landscape and the body alike, using the land as a metaphor through which we encounter ourselves.

Concurrently in the 1980s, Scher founded Safe and Secure Productions, a business focused on security installations—including locks, grilles, and cameras—for mainly women clients. She was drawn to surveillance technology for its capacity to help her feel close to loved ones despite being, as she put it, “perched at a far corner of the US.”

For the last forty years, Julia Scher's research has explored social control dynamics in the public sphere, focusing especially on themes of surveillance. While her art projects have since exploited various media such as interactive installations, site tours, performances, photography, writing, video, and sound, Sanctuary testifies to her initial training in painting. The work further bespeaks Scher’s interest in the function of surveillance that, literally, captures landscape on screen, ultimately shaping the environment we inhabit.