Metropolitan Salem, Liuerpul

Ben Judd makes deceptively ‘gentle’ yet provocative work, often depicting highly stylised fractured communities, or representations of communities, disassembling and reassembling themselves through invisible or at least barely discernible forces and in seemingly ad-hoc arrangements – a choreography of artefact and performance. You can see one in particular I like here.

Writing about a previous exhibition of his, Ben claimed that it engaged with “an historical overlapping in the development of the empirical and scientific with the irrational and mystical. It is this relationship between the distant and the near, between the unknown and the known,”[1] an analysis equally applicable to The Part Versus the Whole his new exhibition in Liverpool that I have had some small involvement in.

Last month Ben approached me, Maria Venegas Raba and Wanyi Zhang to make some work for a forthcoming exhibition. The exhibition, on from 9 June 2018-18 August 2018, is part of curator Rose Lejeune’s series of exhibitions called New Perspectives and takes place at Liverpool’s Victoria Gallery and Museum, a location which became crucial for the work Maria, Wanyi and I produced.