Julie Buteux
This Too Shall Pass
Imagine my surprise when I discovered emotions are not thoughts but physical sensations-chemical responses released in the brain. For years, I carried stories of joy, injustice, shame, and frustration, believing them to be my emotions. In reality, those stories were simply thoughts I had attached to fleeting feelings.
Science has shown that, with the exception of grief, emotions pass through the body in just ninety seconds-just a minute and a half. Yet, instead of allowing emotions to move through me by simply naming them and letting them go, I held onto them, replaying narratives that kept them alive far longer than necessary.
This realization has profoundly shaped my artistic practice. Through my work, This Too Shall Pass, I explore the transient nature of emotion and the tension between momentary feeling and prolonged thought. Using images applied to mirrors, I create pieces that serve as meditations on what it means to experience, release, and transform emotional energy. I broke the plate and this feeling is embarrassment. My things were stolen and this feeling is anger. My mother is sick and this feeling is sadness. The mirror reflects the viewer back to themselves, making them an active participant in the work.
An accompanying clock further reinforces this concept, offering an immersive experience of the ninety-second arc in which emotions naturally rise and fall. This added element encourages visitors to confront their own emotional attachments and consider how they engage with their feelings-whether they let them pass or prolong them through thought.
By embracing this perspective, my work becomes a visual and temporal representation of emotion’s impermanence. It encourages self-reflection, awareness, and perhaps even liberation from the stories we tell ourselves.
Artist Bio
Julia Averett Buteux is a Rhode Island-based photographer and visual artist, who integrates the concrete with the incongruous. Bringing her poor vision to the art of photography, she has little concern for hard, clean edges, and adapts to a variety of photographic styles through camera techniques and post-processing. Buteux’s projects, focusing on the planet and the conscious /unconscious human behavior on it, will differ in scope as each viewpoint beckons its own language. Among other venues, her work has been shown at the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana, the PH21 Gallery in Budapest, Hungary and the Southeast Center for Photography in Greenville, South Carolina, as well as Pennsylvania’s Icon magazine
Buteux practiced architecture for twenty years before turning to photography full time. Well-versed in computer-aided design, she enthusiastically embraced digital photo editing techniques and their potential to wield complex magic. Although no longer in the construction industry, Buteux still considers herself a builder of things.
Buteux is a graduate of Hamilton College, Columbia University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She lives in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.