Jackpot!

“Nothing is clearly defined” in Julia Yerger’s art exhibition, which Keith J. Varadi finds to be a big win.

By Keith J. VaradiMarch 17, 2025

JULIA YERGER: WHEN LOTTERY, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, November 9, 2024–January 4, 2025.

The press release for Julia Yerger’s debut exhibition with Chateau Shatto, When Lottery, quotes John Berger’s 1972 Ways of Seeing: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” Like the optic, the haptic, too, comes before language, and this early connection between seeing and touching is at the heart of modernism’s fascination with children’s art. It’s no surprise that the desire to recapture childlike wonder threads through the history of modernism. The paintings that comprise When Lottery manage to be extraordinarily playful without ever feeling like a put-on, in part because of the ways in which they appeal to our sense of touch. These small-to-midsize rectangles are tactile and textured; many are chalky and filled with pastels, layering figures and objects, foreground, middle ground, and background.

Yerger is making beautiful paintings. She is making bold paintings. She’s making wacky paintings. Some of them are kind of funky. At times, they’re a little fucked up but also can be quite funny. They are knowledgeable about art history without getting too nerdy about it. They reference culture without being too overt or corny. What makes them truly peculiar and unlike almost anything else being made right now is how simultaneously digital and legitimately painterly they are. When viewed on a screen, they appear as if they could have been created with a computer, but when you get close in person, you see the touch, the speed, the movement, the scumbling—all utilized in refreshing ways.

Yerger’s use of brushes—a thin brush to cover a larger surface and vice versa—is often unorthodox. She builds up and sands, scrapes, or wipes down surfaces in a way that the effect is reminiscent of the interiors of a building with real history—one of a few ways her canvases seem to gesture to the surrounding walls. The more expansive works she presents are either visceral or ethereal, with the central imagery more frenetic in form and varied in color and composition. There are areas in many of the paintings where it looks like a graffiti artist might have freshly bombed the canvas with oil paint, or as if Katharina Grosse, who is known for her immersive, prismatic, site-specific, all-over paintings, had suddenly decided to try to constrain herself.

Part of the power of Yerger’s paintings is that she gives just enough visual and titular information for you to create a narrative for yourself, but like a Rorschach test, there is the gut reaction and then the questioning of instinct. In Beatles (all works 2024), a janky neo-cubist picture, there is (ironically) only a solitary figure, in a green-lit room, arms spread out. A blanked-out crowd seems to be eating up this central figure. As an audience of one, in this Melrose Hill gallery, I found myself reflecting on the nature of fandom and idolatry, collectivity and community. Similar themes emerge in The Family Band, which has a filled-out group on a stage stacked with amplifiers, but with the front person reading a book. Memoir or manifesto? One fan in the front row holds a bouquet, another has a spiral for a head—the devotional and the deranged.

An Endly is a serene comic book–influenced landscape with a genuinely bizarre public sculpture in the foreground and a pile of bones in the background. The sculpture looks like it could have been a collaboration between John Chamberlain and Frank Stella, microdosing on shrooms during a late-in-life buddy trip. The landscape reminds me of my many drives through Appalachia growing up, which makes the bones that much more startling. It’s a strangely nostalgic psychedelic-art affair. I caught myself in a trance while staring at The Princess Cult for a few minutes. I couldn’t help interpreting a nighttime scene featuring a pileup of living detritus bowing down to a narcissistic Gen Z ninny by an urban river. Some real dark shit, huh?

A group of collages complemented the paintings, though they have their own language connected to and independent from the paintings. They are grittier, and despite being cut-and-paste, they feel somewhat chopped-and-screwed. These aren’t elusive collages like those made by Ray Johnson, or confrontational ones like those by Martha Rosler. Yerger’s function more in a liminal space between painting and drawing, using found paper, including some with preexisting images. The aesthetic is reminiscent of some of the subcultures surrounding the music scenes of the late nineties and early aughts. There are a lot of neon colors, splotches and spatters, patterns upon patterns upon patterns, and moments of clarity amid chaos, such as the starry sky and the phrase “Snag. Purify.” in Alien Children Will Rule the World. In another collage, Welcome to.., perspective is manipulated in such a magnificently unsteadying manner that you simultaneously feel like you’re getting a bird’s-eye view while looking at something straight on. Nothing is clearly defined. This is perhaps emblematic of the exhibition as a whole.

You could bounce around from one piece to the next, from one corner of the room to the next, from one room to the next, and learn more about the last thing you saw and absorbed. It’s like pinball, it’s like poker, it’s like Powerball. When Lottery!

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Featured image: Installation view of When Lottery courtesy of Chateau Shatto.