T H E I C E P L A N T

The past did not exist. Not at all.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, NAUSEA

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
—Pink Floyd, SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND

Ron Jude's latest book project brings new life to a selection of his own early photographs, made in the early 1980s in Central Idaho. Enhanced by "special effects" filters and cheap telephoto lenses (employed at the time with an apparent lack of irony), the pictures range from hazy scenes of a summertime drag race, a recurring forest in changing seasons, midnight horror films on a TV set, and a Nordic-looking teenager who appears as a specter from the artist's past. Edited here nearly 30 years later, the somewhat accidental, experimental body of work acquires unexpected nuance and humor, and has the cohesive qualities of a dream—memories reorganized into a fictionalized narrative, imagery suffused with both an unsettling melancholy and the prismatic glow of youthful reverie. Related in concept and residing thematically between his two previous books—Alpine Star and Other Nature—emmett achieves an aesthetic inspired by equal parts Motörhead and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Ron Jude was born in Los Angeles in 1965, spent his early years as a ski racer in the Pacific Northwest, and currently lives and works in upstate New York. His photographs have been exhibited at Gallery Luisotti (Santa Monica), the Photographer's Gallery (London), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), and Roth/Horowitz Gallery (New York), and have been published in numerous magazines including The New Yorker, Blind Spot, Nest and DoubleTake. Jude is the co-founder of A-Jump Books (www.a-jumpbooks.com) and the author of Alpine Star, Postcards and Other Nature. He is represented by Gallery Luisotti (Santa Monica, CA).