Project - "The Collection"
The Collection
Taking inspiration from the collection of the La Salle University Art Museum, Judd’s installation responds to artworks in the museum by copying and transforming them. Judd reassembles his copies in what he describes a poetic relationships that ignore the original works’ historic and geographic differences. The artist asks us to reflect on the artificial nature in which Museums display their art and the role chance plays in the way their collections are assembled.
Not only does the artist juxtapose Old Master paintings like Thomas De Keyser’s with a Modern, Cubist work, thereby highlighting the dramatic contrast in style between the two works, but he also inverts compositions so that De Keyser’s husband and wife now appear back to back instead of facing each other. The effect suggests that the two have just quarreled, but also gives new status to the wife, because the placement of the husband to the right of his wife is traditionally a privileged position and the figures are now reversed.
Tom Judd’s interest in recycled materials is also evident in his use of found materials, including an old door, a piece of tin and other wood panels. The still-life by Henri de La Porte is painted on a piece of board that is partially covered by old wallpaper, an effect that both conveys a sense of the work’s past in a domestic setting and undermines the neutrality of the Museum’s white walls. Tom Judd describes the process of combining the objects as a piece of complex choreography, adding: “I love to create interesting juxtapositions and to find the poetry in unexpected relationships between images.”