Tom Judd

Lives and works in Philadelphia, PA, USA

Artist statement

TOM JUDD/SUBLIME RELICS Essay by Dr. Luanne McKinnon A native of Salt Lake City, the Philadelphia-based artist, TOM JUDD (b. 1952), has created an oeuvre over the last four decades characterized by its roots in Americana and the West. With landscapes that nuance lore and legend, or claim a geography or anonymous place, and may include object-relics, his work is discernably unique within trends of the sublime in art. In philosophical discourses, the Sublime adheres to notions of spatial immensity and the grandeur of nature; and, at times, turbulent and threatening landscapes, often with ruins or broken fragments thereby portraying a by-gone culture. Inasmuch as Judd’s work is an extension of the long tradition of European Romanticism and nineteenth century American Sublime it runs askew of those conventional modes. A signature approach to the modernist practice of collage and assemblage, Judd integrates passé news clippings, crumbled ephemera, old wallpaper, segments of furniture, cinema stills and found photographs3⁄4of 1940 Hollywood’s takes on the frontier; of Native Americans lost and found; of crashes, collapses, catastrophes natural and human; of American modernism left to ruin3⁄4defined as a virtuosic, visual testimony that yokes memory and imagining. His technique of semi-transparent dripping paint, thinly pasted papers, or segments of rural furniture mirror the ephemeral sense of time felt as material “witnesses.” Although the grandson of renowned Mormon president,...

Artwork