Ron Jude has collaborated with Daisy Chain Biannual on apparel featuring some of the wrestlers from Jude’s “Dark Matter” project. The shirts commemorate the gallery’s 2023 exhibition of of “Dark Matter”. All profits from the sales will go to organizations addressing addiction-related homelessness.
“Central to “Dark Matter” is an associative logic that juxtaposes wrestlers with fires and airplane accidents, invoking a distinctly American 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” 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.” – Daisy Chain