Julie Fragar

Wash Your Face in Cold Water: 26 June – 24 July, 2021, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney

For Wash Your Face in Cold Water, Fragar … adopted water as motif and metaphor, investigating our physical and psychological relationship to this essential ingredient of life. The characteristically intricate suite of six oil paintings sees Fragar examining water as analogous to various existential dilemmas. Grappling with the divide between the tangible and the intangible, Fragar posits water as a slippery threshold “where our psychology meets the outside world” (JF, 2021). In Fragar’s hands, washing, showering, weeping and plumbing are conduits between our inner and exterior registers. Wash Your Face in Cold Water is a figurative wake-up call—water catalysing a distinct return from the speculative to the real. Fragar’s deeply introspective investigation into this most indispensible of liquids has produced a series of highly evocative, dream-like images. As subject matter, water is historically synonymous with grand themes; the romantic, political and ecological (think sublime waterfalls, geopolitical divides, oceans and rivers). Fragar’s paintings, however, foreground domestic, everyday, lived experiences of and with water distilled into spare poems. Near-photographic images of commonplace subjects are deployed as tropes of reality and then collaged into surreal scenes, imbued with sentience by the great finesse of Fragar’s painterly aptitude. These lyrical montages—including a wet black cat, bursting pipes, and an anonymous figure taking refuge from indoor rain—tell personal stories of pressure, endurance, resistance, and surrender. “Water,” Fragar describes, “isn’t always about connection. It can also be about discomfort.... Bruce Lee’s famous adage, ‘be like water’, is a call to adhere to reality, to go with what is... And there is something uncomfortable about adhering to reality.” (James Gatt, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney)

Photography: Ashely Barber