Other Nature
May 23 - June 11, 2009
Gallery Luisotti is pleased to present artist Ron Jude’s first solo show in Los Angeles. In the gallery, Jude will exhibit 11 works from his “Other Nature” series, which, like the New Topographic artists three decades before him, documents the ongoing tension between the march of urbanization and the landscape which it encroaches upon.
Seeking to investigate some of the bedrock notions of 1970s photography –that of man’s distinct role in changing the geography in which they inhabit– Jude’s photography addresses this seminal issue by casting awareness of what is immediately, and preternaturally, around us. At once visually arresting, these landscapes appear with an aesthetic clarity that call to mind the bucolic ideal of romantic landscape painting. Saturated with light and organized with formalist precision, Jude’s photographs of wild thatches and barren pools are upon first witness a visual ruse. They are invested with a visual melancholy that underlie their initial beauty.
What Jude documents in “Other Nature” is the moment of transition between landscape to urbanization. Produced between 1999 through 2007, the titles of the photographs indicate that this isn’t an isolated event unique to any one geography. By locating his “other” landscapes as adjacent to urban centers as dense as Los Angeles, to that of seemingly remote places like the deserts of Far West Texas, the artist insinuates urban transformation as a quietly pervading effect throughout America.