BIO

Julianne Merino (°1991, Hickory, North Carolina, United States) is a New Orleans based multidisciplinary artist. She graduated Massachusetts College of Art + Design in 2014.
The ability to play is a primordial instinct. As a multimedia artist living and working in New Orleans, Louisiana, the city’s suspension of reality into carnival has served as a catalyst for costuming as an art form. I went to school for 2d fine art, but fell in love with the idea of moving art through Mardi Gras and puppetry. Giving a life-force to an object is thrilling.
I'm drawn to working in mediums I have no academic training in because it allows me to have more of a child-like uninhibitedness and rule-bending sense of play. Growing up with a father who designed games, the importance of play is something ingrained in my body. Being able to create a character through costume allows me to tell a story. I strive to do more than make an object you can wear, but worldbuild through detail. Costuming and puppetry is a safe disembodiment from the self, allowing a person to suspend reality for a brief moment.
The theme that I find myself gravitating towards most often is the exaggeration of human excess. There's a type of over indulgent opulence placed in an environment of man made consumerism and material waste, like creating a beautiful headpiece made from entirely discarded materials. By upcycling mass production, you can make very ordinary objects into something else — that can be angelic, surreal, paranormal and ugly. Carnival culture in New Orleans has very much the same sentiment. Primitive revelry and community creation wrapped around the darkest corners of societal overindulgence. Even the shiny, coveted beads that are thrown from floats one night are made of single-use toxic plastics and tossed aside in storm drains tomorrow. The liminality between beautiful and grotesque contradictions occupying the same space allows me to invent an exaggerated world adjacent to our reality.