Sydney Exhibition

Jude Williams

Opens Wed 28 October / 6 – 8pm
Runs 29 October – 9 November 2020

We’re so happy to have Jude Williams back for a solo exhibition. Williams is an emerging artist who recently graduated with Bachelor Visual Art (Honours) at Sydney University. Her practice is situated within The Everyday in the expanded field of painting, photography and video. She primarily uses photographs, paint and video to explore the spaces in-between and the ambiguity in the reality of everyday images. Williams majored in both Photomedia with Cherine Fahd and Julie Rrap and Painting with Matthys Gerber, Justene Williams and Mikala Dwyer at Sydney College of The Arts.

Artist Statement

This 2020 series of paintings, Paris in Store, resulted from an interpretation of Camera Lucida (1980) Roland Bathes and Painting Negation: Gerhardt Richter’s Negatives (1992) Peter Osbourne

The images for these collages were taken from, Paris in Store (2004) by Valerie Weill & Philippe Chancel, a small photographic book from a book stall in Marrickville Metro, Sydney. My desire chose particular photographic images that I longed to inhabit. I first collaged my own illusions (21cm x 13cm) in 2015 as photo paintings, small affirmations of photography by painting.

A further longing occurred in 2020, during COVID19, which led me to photograph my original small photo painted illusions and enlarge them. I created a different representational form by painting them thickly, some even blurred. My desire to inhabit is as Roland Bathes says, a ‘fantasmatic’ illusion. In his book Camera Lucida, the word fantasmatic refers to Bathe looking at a photograph of an old house in a landscape, an image which truly touches him so deeply he longs to inhabit what the image conveys to him beyond the house. He goes on to describe the word fantasmatic as something that, evolves from a kind of second sight which seems to carry you forward to an imaginative time or carry you back to somewhere in yourself.  ‘Paris in Store’ are photo paintings of places I fondly feel about and feel safe in and as Bathe says, ‘as if I were certain of having been before or of going there’.[1]

Bathes says that every photograph is a ‘certificate of presence’: ‘The presence of the past within the present’. My initial collages became certificates of my intimate presence, once removed from the original images. Peter Osbourne in talking about the photo-paintings of Gerhardt Richter, takes Bathe’s idea further saying, ‘that every photo-painting is also a certificate of presence, but of another kind: the presence of the photograph in representation and that this presence can only be marked beyond the photograph itself, by a different representational form’.[2]

The original photo paintings, photographed and enlarged, have been reappropriated by painting. In painting densely over the photographed paintings again, and the titles lacking precise detail, I have doubled the distance of my original images, yet created more of what was, than what currently is present in the original images. The series, ‘Paris in Store’ 2020, is positioned as a channel of meditation on the experience of proximity and distance between the viewer and the paintings. [3]  

[1] Roland Bathes, Camera Lucida, 1980 46-48

[2] Peter Osbourne, Painting Negation: Gerhardt Richter’s Negatives, October .Vol 62 ( Autumn, 1992)

[3] Ibid