Julie Orser

Julie Orser, Occurrence at Lookout Rock, four-channel video & sound installation, 6 min. loop, 2005; installation image, Torrance Art Museum, 2024.

Julie Orser (born 1974) is an American contemporary visual artist based in Los Angeles. Orser merges art and cinema in video, animation, photography and installation works that examine mainstream representations of gender, the female psyche, place and time. Her practice engages with the mechanics and history of American cinema in order to deconstruct genre conventions, narrative structures and character archetypes from a feminist perspective. She isolates specific scenes, gestures and moods and amplifies mise-en-scène (setting, lighting or costume), creating recontextualizations that reveal stereotypes and often unnoticed aspects of filmmaking.

Orser has screened or exhibited work at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Norton Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, among others. Her art belongs to the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is a professor in the Creative Photography & Experimental Media program at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF).

Education and career Orser was born in 1974 in Chicago and grew up in the suburbs north of the city.

Orser's early career included solo exhibitions at Paul Kopeikin Gallery and Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles and Changing Role Gallery (Rome), More recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex (2014), New Britain Museum (2015) and CSUF Grand Central Art Center (2017). She has also appeared in group shows at Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), the Norton Museum of Art, Yuz Museum Shanghai, and Torrance Art Museum.

In 2012 Orser created a music video, short films, and rehearsal and behind-the-scenes videos for the rock band Garbage for their album, Not Your Kind of People.

Julie Orser, Anna Moore, three channel video & sound installation, 6 min. loop, video still, 2007. Work and reception Orser's art operates within and sometimes against the conventions of film genres including the western, melodrama, silent comedy and horror. Orser magnifies and decontextualizes individual moments and filmic devices such as archetypal scenarios and props, genre music and Foley effects, or lighting tropes, while eschewing clear storylines. Her 2007 multimedia installation, Anna Moore, mimicked the interior of a house, giving shape and context to a three-channel video of lush visuals portraying a scenario split between candy-colored suburbia and moody mystery centered on a classic 1950s Grace Kelly-style blonde. Orser turned to the horror genre in the pastiche video, Blood Work (2009), which intercut quintessential props (leather handbag, high heeled shoe, lampshade) being doused with bright fake blood with images of a perpetrator, set to iconic horror sounds and music to both comical and uneasy effect.

In later video works, Orser has examined male stereotypes and Hollywood conventions. Captain Rooftop (2017) offered an absurdist, feminist take on an obsolete masculine figure—a pirate—whose determination to posture and hold his ground proves futile as the surrounding environment literally becomes unstable.