Judy Rifka [US]

“Judy Rifka Compilation: j1d1x9, boooiing-1, ddjr123 and warve pyrogaster” | video
Animation Judy Rifka, Sound and Post-Production Daniel Dibble

venue: a wall in the backyard, entrance from 15 Długa Grobla Str.

 

Judy Rifka says that from about 2008, at first, I posted works from my studio. But it wasn’t long before I was using my webcam to show the art as it happened. For the best part of four years, most of the work has been ephemeral. I’d grab a gaggle of papers I had cut, and hold them in front of the webcam, often mirroring, and shoot the moment that captivated me. Sometimes I colorized. Then I’d share and post. People responded with their Rorschach interpretations. So I was live. I wasn’t making things. Only later did I enlarge the “Monster Photographs,” for example …. But the cut shapes of paper that went into these designs remained detritus on my floor. It would be three more years before I actually pasted the shapes into collages. I think the spontaneity is what “stuck.”

 I always laugh when I think about how I saw Daniel on the thread of a mutual friend. That’s pretty much the way it happened. I asked if I could use his Reverbnation and Soundcloud compositions. The collaborations were pretty open ended. I was dressing in black and juggling paper cuttings hidden between the two mirror images. Later, I was in a mask and costumes, and swathed in LCD projections. Daniel worked on the video post-production on these, re structuring and mastering the sound…. He was in Sheffield, England, FB messaging and art directing, and I was here in Loisaida (For non-New Yorkers, that’s New York’s Lower East Side), costumed and shining projections on myself. I’d be emailing him clips for his comments. Usually, the sessions would end when he told me “Stop Sending!” On the black animations, he isolated these ephemeral moves, and paid so much attention to each one! The whole idea of modern art is to capture the ephemeral.

 We never would have even met without FB [Facebook]. The process of working together on FB was a breeze. Meeting, becoming acquainted with each other’s work. We had all the lo-tech technology we needed. And a ready venue. It provides a context for how we work, and what we want to say. [Source: “Facebook as an Artistic Platform: An Interview With Judy Rifka,” by Jennifer Reeves; in HuffPost Arts and Culture (online), August 10, 2013.]

 

Judy Rifka’s career spans over 50 one-person shows and countless group exhibitions; her work can be seen in numerous public collections in museums and foundations, throughout the United States and Europe. Her work has been featured in major exhibitions including the fabled 1980 Times Square Show, two Whitney Museum Biennials (1975, 1983) and Documenta VII, Kassel; and at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Carnegie Mellon University; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield; Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Laforet Museum, Tokyo; Kansas City Art Institute; The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers; Kunst Rai, Amsterdam; Mint Museum, Charlotte; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; The Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Rifka has been widely written about, and featured in, among other places, Art Forum, Art in America, Kunst Forum, Tema Celeste, Flash Art, The New Yorker, Elle and New York Magazine.