Statement
Through semi-abstract drawings, prints, and objects, Julian Harake explores our disconnect from the physical world and each other, in the age of social media and post-truth politics. His practice embraces trompe l'oeil techniques, subconscious mark making, and a wide range of high and low technologies—from digital physics simulations to wheel thrown ceramics—evoking images of screens, curtains, mounds, organic matter, and his own body. Mining collective feelings of isolation and his own multicultural upbringing, his work is a vehicle to examine the estranging nature of contemporary life as experienced through filters, digital media, and simulacra, while attempting to connect with the world in more direct and primitive ways.
Bio
Julian Harake is an artist, designer, and educator based in New York City. His work bridges architecture, engineering, and improvisation, merging analog material experiments with recursive and digital processes. Julian has exhibited in various galleries in New York, and he has taught at Barnard College, Syracuse University, Princeton University, UC Berkeley, and Parsons School of Design. His essays and criticism have been featured in Dispatches Magazine, the New York Review of Architecture, Pidgin, and See/Saw, alongside several published books. In 2020, Julian managed the design and installation of Geoscope 2 with Reiser+Umemoto, RUR Architecture, which was exhibited in the Central Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Biennale of Architecture. He also led the curation and design of three exhibitions with RUR—Weaponized Craft at a83 gallery (2022), Lyrical Urbanism: The Taipei Music Center at Cooper Union’s School of Architecture (2022), and Building Beyond Place at ETAY Gallery / TAAC Tribeca (2019). Julian received his M.Arch from Princeton University in 2016, where he was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize.