Gallery Luisotti is pleased to present Ron Jude: 12 Hz. The title of this series, 12 Hz, references the lowest frequency threshold of human hearing, thus suggesting forces that lie at and beyond the limits of human perception. For Jude, those forces are the unseen, slow, planetary processes that shape Earth’s natural systems, forces apparent in the series’ wide-ranging subject matter: lava fields, coastal caves, tidal flows, waterfalls, forest floors, and glaciers.

Initially exhibited at Gallery Luisotti in 2018, in an exhibition the Los Angeles Times’s Leah Ollman stated “A visit to Ron Jude’s ravishing show at Luisotti presses the reset button, recalibrating our scale of significance and restoring to awe its rightful measure of stunned respect.” 12 Hz was subsequently expanded with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and published in book form by MACK in the Fall of 2020. The current exhibition is thus an opportunity to view the full range of Jude’s project, a body of work invested in our need to respect and admire the natural world, while appreciating those processes that exist beyond our understanding.

—Robinson Jeffers

—Eugenie Shinkle, C4 Journal

12 Hz recants a history of nature photography in which “nature” is centered on human geography. Sparked by his move in 2015 from upstate New York to the Pacific Northwest, 12 Hz has a peculiar relationship to place. Jude titles the work only descriptively (Moulin, 2019 or Cooled Lava with Fracture, 2020), thus avoiding specific markers of location. As he stated in a conversation with Carl Fuldner in December, 2020, “I intentionally avoided references to place, not wanting to tether the individual images to mappable ‘locations’.” To his point, as Jude said of the work, the forces he captures are “not exactly photographable.” With a mastery of tone, texture, and scale, Jude is up to the challenge.

Images from artists studio in Eugene, Oregon

—Barry Lopez

The black-and-white photographs that make up 12 Hz are printed large-scale, which enhances and makes palpable the surface of Jude’s subjects: be it deep-black lava, foamy white surf, or the serpentine trunk of a tree. At such a scale, the images are immersive and awe-inspiring. The few horizon lines, the limited depth of field, and lack of human presence make for an uncanny experience. The subjects Jude captures are both indelibly familiar, while distant and other-worldly. As Jude stated about his initial approach to the work, “What would it be like to make pictures of imperceptible forces in the landscape? Things that happen in deep time, rather than in the human perception of time.” With a careful attention to light, to surface, and to the slight cadence of geological and silvological processes, Jude’s 12 Hz is a moving, if also humbling, depiction of the natural systems that shape our planet’s terrain.