3/19/2017
Fabric, Photographic: Jude Broughan's "Athenree" at Benrubi Gallery | BLOUIN ARTINFO

Fabric, Photographic: Jude Broughan's
"Athenree" at Benrubi Gallery
BY TAYLOR DAFOE | FEBRUARY 07, 2017
(/#FACEBOOK)
(/#TWITTER)
(/#PINTEREST)
View Slideshow
(/photo-galleries/judebroughan-at-benrubigallery)
Jude Broughan, "Winter Work," 2015 (detail). Archival pigment print and stretched vinyl, 36 x 50 inches. © Jude Broughan. Courtesy of Benrubi Gallery, NYC.
At first glance, the work in "Athenree," the new exhibition by New Zealand-born, Brooklyn-Based artist Jude Broughan up now through
February 25 at New York’s Benrubi Gallery, is hard to dig into. Comprised of printed photographs and various textiles, sewn or affixed together
in a frame, the works elude categorization. They exist somewhere between photo-sculpture and mixed media collage. They’re slapdash and
crudely arranged. The photos are obscured, out of focus, or nondescript. Many of them look like outtakes and misfires, or maybe snapshots
edited from a family album: a corner of a workspace, for example, or a gradated sky at sunset. The fabric is ripped and torn, like it was sourced
from a tailor’s trashcan. The stitching meanders like the steps of a drunk.
It’s tempting, given the lack of immediate footholds, to approach Broughan’s work in this show
as photographic. It’s not an illegitimate interpretation. For one, the hosting gallery, Benrubi, is
primarily a gallery of photography. For another, each work employs an individual photograph as
its central point of focus, with the rest of the diverse materials, including linen, leather,
polyester, and vinyl, attached. Yet, despite the fact that it’s so in touch with the language of the
medium, the majority of the work in "Athenree" is not really photographically oriented. For
Broughan, the photos — indexical, inscrutable; autonomous objects unto themselves — act as
just another material in her abstract assemblages. The whole is more than its parts.
http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1918152/fabric-photographic-jude-broughans-athenree-at-benrubi
1/4
3/19/2017
Fabric, Photographic: Jude Broughan's "Athenree" at Benrubi Gallery | BLOUIN ARTINFO
Nevertheless, looking at the photos housed in the individual artworks provides a key to the rest of the composition. For instance, many include
shots of a fabric — a direct link between the form and the content. In “Downstairs,” 2016, a drab square of linen frames a faded wool coat; in
“Dean Street III,” 2016, a piece of vinyl emulates two pieces of cloth hanging in the photograph to which it’s sewn.
Other photos have a distinctly industrial feel: a picture of an old 1950s- or ’60s-era machine, a rusty dolly, and so on. Indeed, mass
manufacturing is a theme that courses through much of the show. A series of works, including “Cognition,” “Collection,” “Curve and Loop,”
“Machine,” and “Whanau” (all 2016), feature four identical copies of the same image, emphasizing photography’s ability to be copied and
disseminated ad infinitum. The photos are literally stitched together by thread — a visual pun and a means of drawing attention back to the
materiality of the objects. These works are also clearly homages to Warhol’s sewn photos, which were made with the same rules: four copies of
one image, sewed together at the seams.
The most prominent textile in "Athenree" is vinyl. A cheap, inorganic fabric, vinyl is often used to mimic more expensive materials; again, like
photos, it can be easily multiplied. Broughan’s use of the material, however, gives her work a painterly quality. With its smooth surface, the vinyl
looks like a painted canvas when stretched taught. In its composition and de-saturated color, it vaguely recalls the visual vernacular of post-war
painters such as Frankenthaler or Rothko. Lucio Fontana (/artists/lucio-fontana-3323)’s Spacialist surface punctures also come to mind. The
larger works in "Athenree," including “So Long,” “Faculty,” “Beats,” “Sticks,” and “Winter Work” (all 2016), feature vinyl stretched over wooden
frames, with sharp tears in the body. The holes in the fabric reveal photographs, back-mounted and recessed from the surface, mimicking a
shadow box or old television set.
The strongest works in the show, though, are the smallest. This is where the juxtaposition of photographic prints and their fabric counterparts —
the dialoguing of materials, mediums, and shapes — is at its most potent. Consider “Extrados” (2016), which features a black-and-white shot of a
studio corner with a semi-circle of vinyl sowed to the bottom. “Assembly” (2016), is a tightly cropped photo of an apartment building’s façade
with many of its windows shaded by flat blue curtains (made from vinyl, presumably). A scrap of tan vinyl, sewed to the top of the photo, acts as
a kind of curtain itself, blocking half the frame. Finally, “Label,” (2016), which features a positive film transparency of an ad stitched into white
vinyl and red leather, looks like a Robert Heinecken paraphotograph.
The internal logic to Broughan’s work is often obfuscated by the material play. At times, the constituent parts don’t quite gel into something
bigger. In the instances when they do — and there are several — the result is almost elegiac, capturing the fractured ways in which memory is
divvied up and imbued into objects of the everyday.
View Slideshow (/photo-galleries/jude-broughan-at-benrubi-gallery)
(/#facebook)
Contemporary Arts (/visual-arts/contemporary-arts)
Jude Broughan (/tags/jude-broughan)
Mark Rothko (/tags/mark-rothko)
News (/visual-arts/news-0)
Benrubi Gallery (/tags/benrubi-gallery)
Lucio Fontana (/tags/lucio-fontana)
Features (/visual-arts/features)
Athenree (/tags/athenree)
Andy Warhol (/tags/andy-warhol)
(/#twitter)
Visual Arts (/visual-arts)
(/#pinterest)
Taylor Dafoe (/tags/taylor-dafoe)
Helen Frankenthaler (/tags/helen-frankenthaler)
Robert Heinecken (/tags/robert-heinecken)
RECOMMENDED
(/node/2012247)
(/news/story/2002875/artwork-by-jordi-alcarazat-galeria-joan-prats-barcelona)
(/news/story/2011231/time-light-japan-at-artgallery-nsw-sydney)
http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1918152/fabric-photographic-jude-broughans-athenree-at-benrubi
(/node/2001545)
(/news/story/2001478/allombra-delle-piramidiat-museo-barracco-di-scultura-antica)
2/4