SIGNS: Vaughn Judge

23 January 2007 - 22 February 2007

VAUGHAN JUDGE:  Signs

January 23 – February 22

Miller/Geisler Gallery is pleased to present the first New York solo exhibition of Scottish photographer Vaughan Judge.

The exhibition is comprised of three distinct “bodies” of Judge’s work: “Mapping the Interior,” a series of large-scale c-prints documenting abandoned rooms in various states of disrepair; four “Scarified” figurative black and white photographs; and a series of color photograms exposed through familiar domestic debris. 

Judge’s works illuminate the vernacular of urban life and its throwaway goods.  His “subjects” may be translucent shopping bags, or the interiors of deserted buildings, or even nudes positioned in the manner of Ingres – however, in each work, Judge reverses the viewer’s expectations.  The shopping bags, when exposed as photograms, become curious glowing abstractions, thereby inverting their disposable nature. The empty and decaying rooms are made into eerie portraits of vacancy, long forgotten by their former inhabitants. The hearth’s that anchor these compositions imply both the nurturing quality and the inevitable abandonment of the “home.”  The subjects of the Scarified images, in one instance a classically posed nude, are marred or marked by the artist’s scarification of the negative. This visual element can be read as a simple gestural mark or a symbolic act of desecration, devaluing the photographic medium as fine art making.  Judge’s photographs, informed by artists from Man Ray to Robert Polidori, are a testament to one of the most cutting-edge art schools and photography departments in Europe.

Vaughan Judge lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.  He is currently Head of the Department of Fine Art Photography at the Glasgow School of Art.  Judge’s work is collected by such distinguished institutions as the Scottish Arts Council and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and was most recently exhibited in a group show entitled “Scotland Calls,” sponsored by the Navigator Foundation in Boston.