Artist Lecture- Julia Scher

Julia Scher’s lecture was exciting, unexpected, and extremely animated. Some of Scher’s work seems less like art and more like experimenting and observing people. She is extremely interested in the idea of surveillance, privacy and security, and uses these ideas in many of her works. For example, she would take footage from security cameras and loop it or exhibit it at an entirely different place. Additionally, throughout the entire lecture, Scher enjoyed challenging the audience by asking them why did they think a certain way or encourage them to observe the world differently.
In the entire lecture, I liked Scher’s description of her exhibit, Wonderland the most. She focused on the idea of surveillance and privacy and built an entire exhibition around this idea. She had children dress in police uniforms and wear hats all in pink. She wanted to compare the idea of blue, a very typical surveillance color, to the opposite of it. She then had the children to go on a website teaching them about as she described it, recognizing bad people and investigating their own bodies. I thought it was weird but I liked the concept of using the Internet. The Internet is a place that suggests freedom but obviously all people who use the Internet are under surveillance. I was extremely impressed by how Julia Scher was extremely technologically savvy. She knew what kind of computers, speakers, and others pieces of technology that she used and seemed to effortlessly remember all of them. I think that Wonderland was an exhibit that could easily connect with an audience and also raised important questions about the society that we live in. Her choice to use children to investigate surveillance seemed logical because their naïveté and inquisitiveness seemed to contrast with the idea of surveillance and this sense of paranoia. She expressed her reasoning and the process of why and how she made her work extremely well.