Becoming-World

Becoming-World emerges from four years of walking the same route—a daily ritual rooted in the roadside ecologies of New York’s Hudson River Valley. Along this shifting ribbon, wildflowers flare and fade, wind carries seed from one season into the next, and shadows slip across a body that never returns quite the same. Through layered video and spatial sound, intimate assemblages, and an altar of dried botanicals, sustained attention gathers these fragments into a constellation of material memory, softening the boundary between self and world. Moving between sensory abundance and quiet pause, the works linger with the beauty, strangeness, and vulnerability of everyday encounters. They invite viewers to draw close to a damaged yet still miraculous world—not as something outside us, but as a web of relations through which we are continually composed.

Julie Gemuend is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher working at the crossroads of visual arts and philosophy. Her practice is aligned with a number of intersecting movements that emerged in the 1960s, including performance-based video and land art. In her work, Julie aims to explore our connection with the natural world by probing the edges of identity and environment, interiority and exteriority, and the places where the two merge. Through walking-based practices and attentive engagement with everyday materials, her work explores intimacy, ecology, memory, and more-than-human relationality. She employs her body to speculate on theories concerning the self, materiality, and the intersection of theory and practice. She is currently completing her PhD in interdisciplinary humanities at Brock University.