Ritual Held
What gives an object meaning? Is it inherent, or does it emerge through how we encounter it, again and again, over time?
Julianne Chladny is a Vancouver-based artist working primarily in drawing. Her practice explores repetition, interruption, and restraint as methods of inquiry, examining how meaning accumulates through everyday objects, gestures, and acts of attention. Through the interplay of realism and abstraction, her work considers ritual not as belief, but as a practical structure for holding memory, continuity, and care over time.
Ritual Held considers ritual as something both intentional and relational. It is not only something we inherit, but something we make - through repetition, attention, and care. In a world that often demands clarity and speed, these works offer a different pace: one where meaning unfolds gradually, and where continuity is built through the quiet persistence of everyday acts.
This body of work was produced as part of posAbilities’ Artist in Residency and begins from the idea that meaning is never fixed. Instead, it is shaped through context, repetition, and perception. Familiar symbols such as flowers, knots, keys appear throughout the work, but not as stable or singular signs. They shift gently between associations: love and loss, protection and longing, the sacred and the everyday. Rather than offering clear interpretations, the drawings open a space where symbols remain fluid, and where meaning is allowed to move.
At the heart of Ritual Held is an interest in ritual, not as something distant or purely inherited, but as something we build through daily life. Ritual is approached here as a form of care: toward oneself, toward others, and toward what we hope for. Existing somewhere between reason and symbolism, ritual persists through habit, repetition, and continuity. It lives in the small, often unnoticed actions that create structure and shared presence.
The drawings, created primarily in pencil and conté, reflect a practice grounded in discipline and accumulation. Marks are built up slowly, then partially erased or interrupted. Familiar forms are rendered with care, only to be disrupted by abstraction, diagrammatic lines, or intentional gaps. These moments of absence - often taking the shape of circles - act as openings, allowing memory and emotion to enter. They are spaces where something unspoken can be held.
Many of the works focus on everyday objects and gestures tied to personal ritual. These forms, shaped through repeated use and proximity, begin to carry psychological weight. They hold attachment, comfort, longing, and love. The rituals they reference may seem modest or even mundane but they carry quiet aspiration. Meaning here is not explained; it is formed through practice.
Alongside the drawings, the exhibition includes plaster-cast vessels derived from glass bottles - casts of everyday vessels associated with consumption, habit, and social ritual. By suspending their original function, the works transform objects of use into hollow forms that hold the trace of what was once contained.
It also included a participatory installation that visitors could engage with independently or via a facilitated workshop. Visitors were invited to write and/or draw their intentions, desires, or remembered rituals on circular paper forms. These are then added to a growing field of tied strings and knots. In this way, what begins as individual reflection becomes collective presence, an accumulation of gestures that mirrors the logic of ritual itself.
The show culminated in a closing reception, where friends, family and community members gathered to celebrate the work and talk about their own relationship to ritual, material and meaning-making.
