Jude Broughan “Certain Lights”
Churner and Churner
This event has ended.
Churner and Churner presents the gallery’s first solo exhibition by Jude Broughan. The 14 new works in “Certain Lights” are bold juxtapositions of structure and surface that oscillate between the figurative and the abstract. By layering photographs between vinyl, leather, and mesh, and sewing the printed images directly to the fabric’s surface, Broughan amplifies the voice of a given substance one moment and softens it the next.
The play between represented and reflected light is often thematized in the works. In Close-up and Neon Rendering, for example, photographs show objects held up to the sun so that we see them in silhouette and cross-section simultaneously. But it is not the metaphorical as much as the material that engages Broughan. The grounds of Close-up and Neon’s Rendering glow with bright, chemical hues, while the textures of the digitally montaged images they incorporate suggest the static-electric fuzz of a photocopy. A sheet of translucent mint-green vinyl stretched over white bars emits a soft, quasi-electronic radiance in Window, while the teal-blue polyester ground of Stage is punctuated by shots of twilit construction sites, errant splotches of gel adding kinetic-organic energy. Later sets ’90s-vintage large-format transparencies from the stage-managed world of food and product photography against a print of a camellia bush from the artist’s native New Zealand, each element casting its neighbor in a subtly different light.
Broughan’s deceptively unfussy arrangements evince a sensitivity to objecthood and proportion, and aim at both equilibrium and open-endedness. Informed by visual and intellectual curiosity, her artworks confront the viewer with a quiet, sometimes melancholy smile.
Jude Broughan is a New Zealand-born artist living and working in Brooklyn. Selected recent solo and group exhibitions include “Double Take,” Youme Haus, Brooklyn; and “As If You Were Bringing Back Dust from the Moon,” Papakura Art Gallery, Auckland (both 2014); “Dead in August,” Site95/NYCAMS, New York (2013); “New.New York,” Essl Museum, Vienna (2012–13); “Best of 2012,” Soloway, Brooklyn; “More Songs about Buildings and Food,” Newman Popiashivili Gallery, New York; and “Written by Snakes,” Churner and Churner, New York (all 2012); and “Nauscopy,” Chashama 461 Gallery (2011). Her solo exhibition “Plot” opens at Dimensions Variable, Miami, on September 6, 2014, and she will have a solo exhibition at Calder & Lawson Gallery, Hamilton, New Zealand, in February 2015.
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Schedule
from June 05, 2014 to July 18, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-06-05 from 18:00 to 20:00