RON JUDE, DARK MATTER

In Dark Matter, Ron Jude revisits the source material taken from photographs in his hometown newspaper in Central Idaho in the American West. In this new body of work, Jude reimagines how these photographs can be configured to reflect this microcosm’s collective mood and values. Motivated by a sense of unease and bewilderment with the cultural bifurcation of America, and grounded in a sense of tragedy, loss, and rage, Jude uses a looping tempo of images to surface the latent underpinnings of this mood, located in the helplessness and corresponding desire for control that stutter throughout the sequence. Consistent with themes found in his previous book Alpine Star, Dark Matter is at once a self-reflexive meditation on how cultural context shapes one’s sense of self, and an examination of the way in which photography, as a mass-medium, both mirrors and reinforces shared perceptions and attitudes.