Jude Broughan

Unframed

Take Off (2017) a luminous pigment print by Jude Broughan. Produced in a signed, numbered edition of five, each print incorporates machine stitching and a piece of laminated vinyl. Broughan took the photograph that forms the basis of the work while waiting on the runway at San Francisco airport, en route from New York to New Zealand. The rectangle of laminated vinyl affixed to the image echoes the coloration of the seated passenger silhouetted against a radiant sunburst. Viewed from a certain angle, the vinyl and thread seem to disappear into the dark area at the bottom of the print, while the light becomes an abstract pattern of brightly colored circles that partially obscures the figure. The particular interaction of light and shade in Take Off evokes the conflicting emotions associated with long-haul flight, its curious juxtaposition of privilege and frustration, and its profound destabilization of our sense of place. As Ratik Asokan writes in his Village Voice review of Broughan’s January 2017 Benrubi Gallery exhibition “Athenree,” “Broughan inhabits two worlds: one visible, one internal. She’s shooting a real place, but she’s experiencing it like a shard of half-forgotten memory.”

Jude Broughan creates photo-based collages and assemblages, slicing and stitching together original and found photographs, fabrics, painted and printed elements, in formal compositions that are both abstracted and allegorical- ruminations on photography and perception, as well as processes of traveling and migration, and patterns of human behavior. Her approach is that of a printmaker's mind, attentive to color and material. The use of stitching allows the images, distinguished by their immediacy, to be incorporated into carefully composed arrangements, the thread dividing our attention between the physicality of the art object and the patterning of its surface. In addition to her assemblage studio practice, Jude Broughan also produces limited edition artists' books, and prints. 

Originally from New Zealand, Jude Broughan lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions in New York, Miami, and Hamilton, New Zealand, as well as numerous group exhibitions and projects in Austria, Germany, New Zealand, and the United States, including the MoMA Design Store. She was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2015 and a Yaddo residency in 2018. Her work has been reviewed in Kolaj Magazine, Musée Magazine, Domino, Art in America, Blouin Artinfo, Collector Daily, Eye Contact, The Village Voice, and Whitehot Magazine, among others. Broughan holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA from Hunter College. She teaches in the Visual Arts Department at SUNY College at Old Westbury.