Q&A [Question and Artist]: Joetta Maue

The Brea Gallery opened “Through the Dreamhouse” exhibition on January 27th and will run through March 22nd, 2024. Provoking a sense of familiarity and imagination, “Through the Dreamhouse” invites visitors to explore their memories and experiences, and to reflect on the meaning and significance of a home. As we continue to investigate the symbolism and power of our domestic spaces, we also want to bring a spotlight to a few artists in this group exhibition! Today we welcome multidisciplinary artist Joetta Maue to learn more about her art practice, advice to artists and upcoming projects.

Meet Joetta Maue

[Brea Gallery]: Can you please introduce yourself and share with us who you are as an artist?

[Joetta]: As an artist I work in a multifaceted practice across the disciples of textiles, drawing and photography. My work has explored issues of intimacy, motherhood, labor, female identity, the domestic landscape, and the profound in the everyday. I am trained as a photographer but am most known for my textiles work – though photography informs all aspects of my practice. My current practice combines my mediums in installation- both in space and on the wall.

I am originally & proudly from the Midwest, was a Brooklyn girl for a while and love currently being a New England woman. I live in the Boston area with my partner and 2 kiddos. When I am not making art, I am teaching at UMASS Boston and Lesley University and trying to get to the ocean as much as possible.

[Brea Gallery]: Can you explain the inspiration behind your “Sleeper” series?

[Joetta]: “Sleepers” is inspired by a body of work that is located within the landscape of the home, focusing on the conflicts and contradictions that exist within intimate relationships and the issues of identity that can come up in marriage and long-term relationships.

The bed is an important location within the landscape of intimacy, and I have often returned to it as subject in my work.  I consider the role of the bed in our everyday lives, its power, but also how it is a forgotten, dismissed, overlooked space, is the last room to be renovated, the door that gets closed when guests come over, the place where most of us are born and most of us die.  This meditation on the bed put me in contact with the liminal nature of the bed.

Simultaneously, in my daily practice of photography - I was photographing myself and my husband – this included us sleeping. In the sleeping images I was struck by the thought that not only is the bed a liminal space but our very bodies are in a moment of the liminal — we are soft but splayed, in a place of in-between, we look both angelic and death-like, conscious and unconscious – this led me to explore the sleeping figure as a subject.

[Brea Gallery]: How did you begin coming up with new ways to display these sleepy people?

[Joetta]: Initially these works were much smaller scale and more densely stitched, then I started to work towards life-size, but in portrait orientation, and eventually the full figure life size work on view at Brea Gallery.

I was preparing a photography and text installation, focused on the bed as a place of both yearning and isolation for an upcoming solo show and envisioned the work “waking with you.” A life-size full figure piece where the “other” the “lover” was absent and instead of their body that empty space was filled with a love letter of yearning. Technically this is when I began to incorporate applique as a device of filling space, adding paint to add a soft sense of color and to use more open stitches that alluded to drawing techniques.

In response to the desire to activate the space of the gallery I installed the actual bed to hold the work within the photo/text installation. At the time of making “waking with you” I was commuting from Western Massachusetts, finishing my MFA, to Brooklyn, where my partner was living, this is very much reflected in the work.

In documenting my process I was fascinated with the splayed sleeping figure of “waking with you” inspiring me to make the series of various portraits which became the “Sleepers” series. The construction of each piece is heavily influenced by the visual of the photograph that.

[Brea Gallery]: What topics inspire your art?

[Joetta]: My work is always in some part inspired by my lived experience. It is often reflective of the maturation and psychological space that I am currently in. For instance, “Sleepers” was made during a period where I was newly married and was investigating my identity as a partner and wife. “Exhausted” reflects the transition to becoming a mother, as it is based on an image of myself a week after my son’s birth.

As I became a mother, my content turned to the complex experience of caring for and loving a child but also the invisible labor, loss of self, and overwhelm that it contains. As my children have grown up, and caregiving looks different, my work has turned more to my own psychological journey in relation to everyday suffering, the beauty we can see within our everyday, our relationship to the universe & the profound and the connections our daily life can have with these aspects of the human experience.

[Brea Gallery]: What has helped you in leading your artistic mission and/or inspires you to keep going?

[Joetta]: Mostly straight up drive. I am driven to create and have strict structure around protecting this desire and practice.

The voice and perspective of women is still quite invisible in the art world, & world at large, I am invested in creating visibility for the female experience to be recognized and heard. Additionally, my belief in the power of awareness and presence inspires my work and the choice of seeing beauty in the darkest or most confusing of times.

When I need support or inspiration I often turn to books, I read about the minds, creators and artists that I relate to or who inspire me. Since Covid and its feeling of isolation I have created a strong community of other female artists around me who are constant support and inspiration.

But I am most inspired by my family- the everyday experience of being a partner and mother and witnessing the people that I love evolve, suffer, shift and change is a constant source of inspiration for my work- even when the work seems removed from this- it is most rooted within those relationships.

[Brea Gallery]: What are 3 things in your studio right now that you are obsessed with?

[Joetta]: Light, Light, Light- I am totally and completely obsessed with the wonder of light. Light is literally the sun’s rays moving through space and across the objects, the walls, the surfaces that we tiny humans have created. It is a phenomenon that connects our small human lives with the vastness of the cosmos. It moves within/through the space which lies in between.

Dust… I collect the sweepings from both my studio and home space and work from them to make camera-less photographs and highly detailed drawings. I am fascinated how the dust of our spaces act as portraits of the lives lived, the bodies within and the activities done-but with process and the use of abstraction these little, tiny bits of evidence of our small lives can be transformed to speak of the stars, the universe and the cosmic realm

Recently I have also become quite interested in the role of research and the archive in my practice. Via teaching I have become more aware of how much I archive my practice and how much of my practice is rooted in research. I am currently trying to find a form that communicates this in my installation work.

Current exploration of light and shadow via studio, @joettamaue on instagram

[Brea Gallery]: Who are your top 3 artists right now?

[Joetta]: My top 3 artists are always and have been for a very long time:

1. The photographer Uta Barth,

2. The drawings and writings of Louise Bourgeois, her book “Drawings and Observations” completely changed my perspective on artistic practice

3. A tie between: Vija Celmins -her ideas on abstraction and rendering everyday objects are so important to me & Moyra Davey- her photographic practice refers back to her research, reading and process.

“Through the Dreamhouse” group exhibition on view now through March 22nd, 2024.

[Brea Gallery]: What advice would you give to artists who might not know where to start in making installation pieces or mixed media work?

[Joetta]: Just start. Working within space or across medium often comes out of play, experimentation, and exploration. All the work on view at the Brea have so many first tries in them. If I was making them now I would do so many things different but that knowledge was learned from doing. My current installations are a totally new direction for my work, and I pretty much have no idea what I am doing, but I have set up my studio to support the work and now I just keep pushing, playing and trying new things.

[Brea Gallery]: Where else can people find your work or what’s coming up next?

[Joetta]: You can always see my work on my website and my Instagram. As mentioned, I am obsessed with documenting and talking about process as part of my practice so my insta is quite active.

I will have 4 works of view in March at Golden West College as part of the “Exhibition Honoring Women’s History Month”, March 7 – April 4, 2024. I currently have work at the Southern Highland Craft Guild in Asheville, NC and in the Spring have work at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN. I will also have work in Matrescence, a show about motherhood at the MASS Art Sowa Gallery in Boston in June and an upcoming solo show at Bentley College in 2024/2025.

I am also teaching a workshop with Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and Snowfarm in Western Mass this summer.

Thank you Joetta! We greatly appreciate your time in sharing some insight with us about your work and what works best for you in your art practice!

Be sure to check out and follow Joetta Maue’s website and social media accounts! Visitors can view her amazing work in person at the Brea Gallery until March 22nd, 2024.

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We are open Wednesday - Sunday

12pm-5pm

General Admission $3

Through The Dreamhouse is on display now through March 22nd, 2024.