Joe Rudko

Region: Pacific Coast

Website: http://www.joerudko.com

City / State: Seattle, WA

My work addresses photography’s continuously expanding role as a tool to communicate ideas, feelings, and truths, and the medium’s tendency to shift shape in how it is defined and understood. Using collage, drawing, and sculpture, all under the guise of something inherently “photographic,” I manipulate, obscure, and otherwise distort found photographs, cutting and tearing them to reveal their limitations as representations of reality. This disruption breaks apart the illusion of the image, exposing the photograph’s vulnerability as a physical object and its increasingly malleable visual representations. Because of their aging and anonymity, these antiquated snapshots have the ability to engage with anonymous personal narratives and the fragmented way we assign value and meaning to their past.