PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR
May 31, 2016 - July 2, 2016
PDX CONTEMPORARY ART is pleased to present new work by Seattle-based artist Joe Rudko, an artist using photography as a point of departure to explore the perception of truth in the visual. By disassembling fixed images and creating new visual relationships with color, line, and shape, he invites us to reexamine how we author and interpret the experience of looking at photography.
These works are made from thousands of snapshots recovered from an abandoned shed in Washington State. The pictures span roughly 100 years of time (1902-2005), holding all kinds of subjects within them: water, reflections, sunsets, smiles, vacations, and most everything else that could live inside of a photograph. Repeatedly tearing particular subjects from their original context highlights the ubiquity of these subjects and the multitude of interpretations that a single moment in a single photograph can hold. If a single photograph is a marker of something valued, than large quantities set up a dialogue between individual and collective value. Black and white photography mingles with a range of color that varies across time, place, and chemistry, and particular subjects start to speak for themselves.
