Joe Rudko lives and works in Seattle, WA. He received his BFA from Western Washington University and has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Seattle, Portland, Denver, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and New York City, including shows at Greg Kucera Gallery (Seattle, WA), the Portland Art Museum, PDX Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), Von Lintel Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), and Davidson Contemporary (New York, NY), among others. He was the recipient of the Future List Award, the Anne Tucker & Clint Willour Young Photographers Endowment, the Facebook AIR Program, and the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship Award.
His work is in the collections of The Getty Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Cleveland Clinic, Fidelity Investments, the City of Seattle, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and featured on the cover of indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie’s album Kintsugi. Rudko’s work has been featured and reviewed in ARTFORUM, Art in America, HAFNY, City Arts Magazine, Fukt Magazine for Contemporary Drawing, art ltd., Visual Art Source, The Stranger, Lenscratch, and The New York Times.
Artist Statement:
"I collect personal snapshots from friends, family, and anonymous internet vendors, before deconstructing and combining them into new unified forms. Made with a luminous array of found photographs, these collages are composed of repeated motifs, shifting forms, and delicate cuts. Each unique work contains a multitude of sources that span the history of the printed photograph.
Cutting a photograph into fragments disassociates the image from its context, rendering it more material than image. These materials are arranged by color within a structural grid, with influences as diverse as ancient Mesopotamian mosaics, color field painting, and modern digital pixels. In this framework, I am curious to explore how the collective materials of the past can reframe our understanding of the present."