When we eat at chain restaurants, we taste not just the food but also the marketing that brought us there. It is a small conceit with large implications; everything we touch, taste, hear, smell, and see is flavored by our conditioning and posture. The world is as much projected out from us as it is received sensorially.

Toward making visible these inescapable processes of perception, I create hyperrealistic digital prints—flat works on paper appearing heavily textured—that amplify the gap between reality and appearances. By discerning the differences between what we see and what we think we see, I invite viewers to recognize other ways in which our outlooks and beliefs are manipulated against our awareness, concomitant with our disconnect from the world, each other, and ourselves. As digital screens, misinformation, photo manipulation, and artificial intelligence readily lend themselves to this estrangement, I turn these tools against themselves to draw upon primordial gut reactions of disgust, alienation, and longing. Doing so makes visible both the power and omnipresence of our preconceptions, so that we might confront the means through which we constitute reality.

Julian Harake is an artist, registered architect, educator, and critic. He is the founder of Studio Harake, an art and design office mediating architecture, nonlinear dynamics, digital fabrication, and improvisation to bridge cultural forms and natural systems.

Julian has facilitated university-level courses since the age of 19, beginning with a contemporary art course for students in outside disciplines at UC Berkeley. Since then, he has developed and taught design studios, advanced seminars, and theory courses at a range of institutions, including Princeton University, Barnard College, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Parsons School of Design, and Syracuse University.

Julian’s creative contributions have been exhibited internationally, and his essays and criticism have been featured in Dispatches Magazine, the New York Review of Architecture, Pidgin, and See/Saw, alongside several published books. He also led the curation and design of three exhibitions with RUR Architecture: 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 B.A. from UC Berkeley in 2013 and M.Arch. from Princeton University in 2016, where he was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize. He is currently an artist in residence at Santa Barbara’s Center for Art, Science, and Technology.

513 Garden Street, Suite P, Santa Barbara, CA 93101

jdharake@gmail.com