Free range 

Curator: Right now, we're looking at Julie Mehretu's piece, "Free Range," a drawing that employs graphite on paper. It immediately suggests a city, doesn’t it? A network of something expansive... Editor: You know, looking at this, the first thing that strikes me isn’t exactly the grandeur of a cityscape, but its precariousness. Like a sketch that could dissolve any minute now—evanescent, you might even say. A fragile utopia...or dystopia. Curator: Well, the "fragile" aspect you’re feeling might be linked to Mehretu's characteristic use of layering. She's not just representing physical spaces, but also how history, politics, and social movements build up and exert pressure within them. Her technique mirrors that process. Think about the layers of urban planning documents or even maps, all contributing to the urban experience. Editor: That’s interesting because, initially, those layered lines felt more like echoes or afterimages than constructed systems. Almost as though the graphite is attempting to capture memories of place, memories overlapping and blurring into abstraction. There’s this dynamic tension in "Free Range" between the deliberate—those geometric forms—and the incidental, the almost chaotic scribbles. It sort of mimics how we actually *experience* cities. Curator: Indeed! She's often discussed her work in terms of palimpsests: spaces that are repeatedly built upon, overwritten, changed by different inhabitants over time. "Free Range," even in its seeming abstraction, hints at very real historical and geopolitical forces. Remember, her work has often reflected on displacement, migration, and globalization. So perhaps those unstable lines represent something more than mere transience. Maybe a deeper unease about contemporary urban life and its associated problems. Editor: I buy that, I mean it does resonate. And isn’t that what we all kinda secretly want from art anyway—not answers, but really great questions phrased in ways that knock us off our feet? I have no idea why Julie named this one "Free Range", but perhaps a nod at letting it run free from any of our notions. Curator: I like the notion of “free range” interpretation. Maybe she really is goading the institutions like ours and us in it to push its own definitions as much as she does in lines over spaces, her perspective makes you think long after you've left the space!