Central to Dark Matter is an associative logic that juxtaposes wrestlers with fires and airplane accidents, invoking an uncanny sense of the sublime. Through this approach, Jude forges connections between unrelated moments of local record culled from 25 years’ worth of imagery published in his central Idaho hometown newspaper. Dark Matter uncovers an inconvenient history that represents Jude’s rural hometown while speaking to a more universal and deeply American condition: the persistence of collective trauma.
Dark Matter revisits the source material of Alpine Star, shown in Jude's 2017 exhibition at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. However, in Dark Matter, he shifts the perspective by upscaling the newspaper’s imagery to more than 3 feet by 2 feet, requiring the viewer to physically back away to read the work. Because legibility is granted only from a distance, the veil of the halftone becomes a metaphor for the interplay between history, memory, and meaning.
The large scale of the works brings the physical nature of the medium into focus, transforming the photo-mechanical signature of newsprint from a background texture into a primary aspect. By emphasizing the grainy artifacts of the original reproduction process, Jude accomplishes a broader objective: the revelation of an iconography made from the raw material underpinning a collective psychology and an impulse toward control shaped by a sense of tragedy and loss.
Dark Matter interrogates how photography, as a mass medium, reflects and reinforces the cultural contexts that shape the self. Here, the vernacular is analogous to the dark matter in physics that binds us all together, an invisible but ever-present force which defines the nature of our realities and our relationships. Jude's Dark Matter reminds us that media is never neutral; it is the foundation upon which mythology and collective identity are constructed.
BIOGRAPHY:
Ron Jude (b. 1965, Los Angeles) is an American photographer whose work examines vernacular imagery, local media, and the accumulation of meaning over time. Raised in rural Idaho, his practice often moves between found photographs, personal archives, and images made in situ, engaging questions of authorship, circulation, and observation.
Jude has exhibited widely for more than two decades, with solo exhibitions at Gallery Luisotti, the George Eastman Museum, the Everson Museum of Art, the Getty, and Robert Morat Galerie, among others. The Museum of Contemporary Photography organized Backstory, a survey of his Idaho-based projects.
He is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. Jude is also the co-founder of A-Jump Books, an independent publishing imprint.
Untitled. (smoke jumper #1) from Dark Matter
36 x 27.5 inches, archival pigment print
Courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles
© Ron Jude, 2022
Untitled. (fire #1) from Dark Matter
36 x 27.5 inches, archival pigment print
Courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles
© Ron Jude, 2022
Untitled. (accident #7) from Dark Matter
36 x 27.5 inches, archival pigment print
Courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles
© Ron Jude, 2022
Untitled. (accident #10) from Dark Matter
36 x 27.5 inches, archival pigment print
Courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles
© Ron Jude, 2022