NYAB Event - “Homeland” Exhibition

“Homeland” Exhibition

William Holman Gallery

This event has ended.

William Holman Gallery presents Homeland, a joint exhibition of works by Tom Judd and Rebecca Bird. Examining ideas of the American landscape, Judd and Bird have each created a new series of paintings, watercolors and collages informed by the idea of space.

Manifest Destiny, a belief that ultimately drove this nation from coast to coast in the 19th century, saw expansion, conquest and consumption as virtues of American progress. In the aftermath of 1850, mapping, censuses, even the highway system have attempted to rationalize and concretize this nation as an inevitable, singular territorial entity, with an equally evident and intelligible historical narrative. Bird’s exquisite and surreal landscape watercolors suggest the darker undertones of this quest; they are filled with the detritus of our history. In Judd’s oil paintings and collages, various scenes - a horse, a lone diver, a winter view of the Columbia River - are framed by mapping lines, grids and pixels, thereby drawing attention to these lost, residual moments through traditional tools of measurement and perspective.

These artists’ works challenge the traditional understanding of landscape as a medium that imposes rationality and subjectivity on a vision of nature. From two distinct perspectives and mediums, Homeland twists the basic visual language of the landscape, including mystical imagery and scenes from memory, which fills the works with historical tension, even anxiety. From a crackle plate to candelabra, these are the landscapes of the shadow of history, scenes recording the breakdown of narrative, irrational behavior and a civilization reduced to the undifferentiated material from which it is composed. Channeling the language of billboards, picture postcards, historical photos and the Hudson River School paintings, the works invoke a nostalgia that implies the palatability, even allure of traumatic events once they are safely situated in the past.

Raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, Tom Judd now lives and works in Philadelphia. The great-grandchild of the famous Mormon president Heber J. Grant, Judd is not an active church member but remains deeply informed by the landscape of his youth in Utah and the West. His work is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Academy of Art and in numerous university and private collections. Judd has been the recipient of the Tandem Press Fellowship Residency, the Millay Colony Fellowship, the MacDowell Colony Fellowship and the Pollock Krasner Grant.

Rebecca Bird is a watercolor, print and animation artist. She was born in Washington State. Bird received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2000. The recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to Japan, Rebecca then studied at Kanazawa College of Art and Craft in in Ishikawa in 2001. Her works are in private and public collections in the US and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center as well as the Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency. Her work has been reviewed positively in Whitewall magazine, ArtSlant and the New York Times.

[Image: Tom Judd, “The Future” 2014, Oil on panel, 30 x 40 inches]