In Dark Matter, Ron Jude revisits the source material taken from photographs in his hometown newspaper in Central Idaho in the American West. In this new body of work, Jude reimagines how these photographs can be configured to reflect this microcosm’s collective mood and values. Motivated by a sense of unease and bewilderment with the cultural bifurcation of America, and grounded in a sense of tragedy, loss, and rage, Jude uses a looping tempo of images to surface the latent underpinnings of this mood, located in the helplessness and corresponding desire for control that stutter throughout the sequence. Consistent with themes found in his previous book Alpine Star, Dark Matter is at once a self-reflexive meditation on how cultural context shapes one’s sense of self, and an examination of the way in which photography, as a mass-medium, both mirrors and reinforces shared perceptions and attitudes.
Ron Jude’s photographs have been widely exhibited internationally and are held in numerous private and public collections. He is the author of twelve books, including Emmett (2010); Executive Model (2012); Lago (2015); Nausea (2017); and, most recently, 12Hz (2020). The traveling exhibition of 12 Hz, organized by the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment, is currently touring the USA and will finish its run at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville in 2024. Jude was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2019 and is represented in the USA by Gallery Luisotti in Los Angeles and in Europe by Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin. He is a professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art at the University of Oregon in Eugene.
20 x 26 cm, 64p, ills. color, double pamphlet stitch binding, Monogram (Paris)