Joe Rudko uses photography as a point of departure for exploring 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.
Support System consists of found images from various sources and time periods that the Artist has methodically cut and assembled into new images. Referencing both Mesopotamian mosaic and photographic pixels that make up digital photographs, Rudko melds together found images to create large edge-to-edge collages. In this process, the Artist removes the context from the original images, creating a new context for the images as a whole.
Working with photos of positive and hopeful imagery, these collages, made during 2020 and 2021, are a response to the challenges of the past year. Images of cake, flowers, blue sky, and sculptures, among others, are conduits for looking to things that are generally regarded as celebratory or pleasing. Collecting images of flowers to arrange in a bouquet, making an image full of blue sky, and constructing a large cake out of images of cakes, Rudko’s exhibition brings light to our collective love of beauty as evidenced through the many photographs found and employed by the Artist.
A graduate of Western Washington University’s Bachelor of Fine Arts program, Rudko has exhibited in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York. He has been the recipient of the Future List Award, the Anne Tucker and Clint Willour Young Photographers Endowment Award, two Art Walk Awards from City Arts Magazine, and the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship Award. Rudko has been part of numerous solo and group exhibitions, including shows at PDX CONTEMPORARY ART (Portland, OR), Roq La Rue (Seattle, WA), LxWxH (Seattle, WA), Disjecta Center for Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), Photo Center Northwest (Seattle, WA), Whatcom Museum of Art (Bellingham, WA), Greg Kucera Gallery (Seattle, WA), Von Lintel Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), and Davidson Contemporary (New York, NY), among others. His work was also featured on the cover of indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie’s 2015 album Kintsugi.
His work is in the collections of The Getty Museum, Cleveland Clinic, Portland Art Museum, Fidelity Investments, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
Rudko’s work has been featured and reviewed in ARTFORUM, Art in America, Oregon Arts Watch, hafny.com, City Arts, Fukt Magazine for Contemporary Drawing, art ltd., Willamette Week, Visual Art Source, Hum Creative, The Stranger, Beautiful Decay, Lenscratch, and Juxtapoz.
I’ve been making photographic collages with hopeful and positive imagery as a response to the challenges and darkness the world has faced this past year. They are composed of personal snapshots from a diversity of sources and time periods and combined into single unified forms. There is a cake, a blue sky, and a bouquet of flowers, among other idealized imagery. These new unified images are held together on an invisible grid that references both the ancient Mesopotamian mosaic and the modern photographic pixel. Cutting a photograph into fragments disassociates the image from its context, rendering it more material than image. In this framework, I am curious to explore the question, how can the materials of the past reframe our understanding of the present?